I Replaced Claude With Chinese AI?

I Let a Chinese AI Build My Entire AppMany months ago, I built an automation workflow that took my long-form Vlog videos, chopped them into short-form videos, and automatically posted those clips across social media.For months, almost nobody cared.Then something weird happened.Several of those shorts suddenly went viral.My TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram accounts started gaining subscribers, and I found myself spending more time on platforms I had previously ignored.And that’s when I discovered something incredibly annoying.Pretty much every social media platform wants you to have one link.Sure, some platforms technically allow multiple links. But there is usually one prominent link sitting right there on your profile.So I needed a simple webpage where I could put everything:YouTube.Substack.My various projects.Basically, one little page containing all the stuff I do on the internet.So naturally, I went looking for a solution.And that’s when I fell down the Link-in-Bio Rabbit Hole.The “Free” InternetThere are plenty of services that will happily let you create a page containing your links.Linktree.Beacons.Squarespace Bio Sites.And technically, many of them are free.But there’s a catch.They’re free in the same way that a casino buffet is free.They put their branding all over your page.Then they send you emails encouraging you to upgrade.And eventually you discover that removing their branding, using a custom domain, or getting some other basic functionality requires paying them significant money.Which got me thinking:Why am I paying a billion-dollar technology company to put six links on a webpage?I have been a software engineer for roughly a quarter century.I can build a damn webpage.So I decided to scratch my own itch.I would build my own link-in-bio SaaS.And then I decided to make the experiment more interesting.I was going to have a Chinese AI build it for me.Specifically, Kimi K3.Enter KimiKimi is an open-source/open-weight frontier AI model created by Moonshot AI.I’ve traditionally used Claude for most of my AI work, so this wasn’t about replacing Claude because I suddenly decided it was terrible.Quite the opposite.Claude is extremely good.But there’s something that bothers me about becoming completely dependent on a single AI company for increasingly large portions of our cognitive workload.If one company controls the models that we use to write software, analyze information, conduct research, and automate our businesses, then that company ultimately controls a surprisingly large piece of our productive capacity.So I wanted to see what an alternative looked like.And this was a perfect experiment.I’d build something real.I’d let Kimi do most of the work.And then I’d see what happened.How Do You Actually Build an AI Software Engineer?There’s a little more to this than simply opening a chatbot and typing:“Build me a SaaS application.”Modern coding agents are much more complicated.At the center of my setup was Kimi K3.Because I don’t have a giant AI data center sitting in my basement, I accessed the model through OpenRouter and used a U.S.-based reseller running the model on U.S. servers.Then I connected Kimi to an agentic harness.Think of the harness as the operating environment around the AI.The language model itself is the brain.The harness gives that brain memory, tools, and the ability to actually interact with the world.One important part of this is the context window.Kimi has a context window of roughly one million tokens.That’s a ridiculous amount of short-term memory.But even one million tokens eventually fills up.When that happens, the model can start losing important details about what it’s doing.The agentic harness helps solve this by maintaining persistent memory in Markdown files and periodically summarizing or compacting the conversation.It can even clear the context entirely and restart from those memory files.That’s basically the AI equivalent of:“Okay, I’ve forgotten everything. Let me read my notes.”The harness also gives the AI access to tools.A database.A browser.Remote APIs.Other software.And increasingly, these tools communicate through something called the Model Context Protocol, or MCP.Then there are skills.Skills are essentially reusable instructions that teach an agent how to perform specific tasks.And this is