On September 17, Moonshot AI's AI assistant Kimi officially launched KimiCode, a dedicated desktop client for programming supporting both macOS and Windows platforms, a day after Anthropic announced it was merging its standalone Chat and Cowork products into a unified Claude. KimiCode moves Kimi's coding agent capabilities, which had previously operated in a terminal environment, from command-line interaction into a graphical interface, letting users open local projects, modify code, execute commands, view file changes, invoke a browser, and control the scope of AI operations through different permission modes. Kimi already offers the KimiWork desktop client for office scenarios, so users wanting Kimi for both office and programming needs may need two separate clients. KimiWork targets office and knowledge-work scenarios, while KimiCode is designed around software development, requiring understanding of the entire code repository, modifying multiple files, running commands, displaying code diffs, and allowing developers to review and control every step. KimiCode also supports third-party models, configurable with model services from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others, as well as compatible interfaces such as DeepSeek and Tongyi Qianwen, attempting to become a multi-model workbench for developers. Kimi has not publicly explained the commercial motivation behind splitting the client.