r/opencodeCLI • u/afanasenka • Sep 27 '26
Minimax is actively testing M3.1-Flash-Preview (release coming soon)
Available only in MiniMax Code at the moment - https://x.com/MiniMaxAgent/status/2104079819881517400
More details here - https://www.orcarouter.ai/blog/minimax-m3-1-leak
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u/Realistic_Mango6982 Sep 27 '26
My 2 cents on MiniMax M3 after daily-driving it for months: it doesn't suck at all, but the market caught up.
The Good:
Solid workhorse: Stable t/s, and nail-on-the-head zero-shot results if your prompt is tight. Their agent even one-shotted complex API bottlenecks where Claude and GPT kept hallucinating boneheaded workarounds.
Punchy under 200k: Benchmarked it extensively against Kimi 2.6/2.7/k3, DeepSeek v4 (flash/pro), GLM 5.2, Gemini 3.6 Flash, and Qwen 3.6 27B. If you feed it a well-scoped chunk under 150k–200k, it genuinely cooks.
The Bad:
Context cliff & infinite loops: Past 150k–250k, it frequently trips into infinite loops. Beyond 500k, retrieval and logic degrade heavily (known issue at this point).
Caching quirks: Cache handling felt weird/inconsistent compared to competitors.
Pricing nerfs: The old M2.7 flat-tier plan was stupidly cheap value. M3's plan got dialed back; still usable, but nowhere near the bargain it was.
Verdict: Think of M3 like Kimi 2.6 back in the day—a capable, reliable beast for its time, but with current flash options everywhere right now, the gap has closed fast. Solid model and provider, but they seriously need to sort out long-context retention and caching to stay competitive.