Kimi K3.1 Pro Is the Open Coding Model to Try This Week — Here's How to Actually Use It

Shivam Kumar · October 26, 2026

Moonshot AI's Kimi K3.1 Pro launched October 23, 2026: a 3-trillion-parameter-class open-weight model with a 1-million-token context window, available now on Kimi.ai, Kimi Work, Kimi Code, and the Kimi API, with full weights promised by November 4. The benchmark headline for builders is Terminal-Bench 4.0 at 65.7% — ahead of GPT-6 Astra (58.2%), just behind Claude Opus 5.5 (66.4%) — and 61.2% on Kimi Code Bench 3.0 Long-horizon, up from K3's 55.95%.

Benchmarks don't ship products. Workflows do. Here's the builder's version of the K3.1 Pro story.

1. Pick the right surface: API now, weights on November 4

Right now there are two ways in:

Kimi Code — run it and select Kimi K3.1 Pro with the /model command. This is the fastest path if you want an agent inside your repo today.

Kimi API — kimi-k3.1-pro for full capability, kimi-k3.1-pro-highspeed for 2–3× faster interactive responses.…