Kimi K2.6 just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a coding challenge
Key takeaways
- I m running the ongoing AI Coding Contest where I pit major language models against each other in real-time programming tasks with objective scoring.
- Kimi K2.6, an open-weights model from Chinese startup Moonshot AI, won the challenge outright: 22 match points, 7-1-0.
- The Word Gem Puzzle is a sliding-tile letter puzzle.
I m running the ongoing AI Coding Contest where I pit major language models against each other in real-time programming tasks with objective scoring. Day 12 was the Word Gem Puzzle. Ten models entered. The results were not what most people would have predicted.
Kimi K2.6, an open-weights model from Chinese startup Moonshot AI, won the challenge outright: 22 match points, 7-1-0. Mi Mo V2-Pro from Xiaomi came second. GPT-5.5 was third. Claude Opus 4.7 finished fifth. Every model from the Western frontier labs landed below the top two.
The Word Gem Puzzle is a sliding-tile letter puzzle. The board is a rectangular grid (10×10, 15×15, 20×20, 25×25, or 30×30) filled with letter tiles and one blank space. Bots can slide any adjacent tile into the blank and at any point claim valid English words formed in straight horizontal or vertical lines. Diagonals don t count. Backwards doesn t count.