MiniMax ships a new coding model with no model card, no benchmarks and no price

On 27 September MiniMax launched M3.1-Flash-Preview, a fast text model for everyday coding, available only inside MiniMax Code and through its Token Plan. The whole public announcement was a one-line post on X.

What is documented

• a context window of up to 1,000,000 tokens
• reasoning switched on by default
• five reasoning-effort levels: low, medium, high, xhigh and a new "max"

What isn't

No model card, no benchmark report, no price and no directly callable API at launch. It arrived days after developers fingerprinted an anonymous free model on OpenRouter, "Space Bunny Alpha", and concluded it was an early build of the same system. MiniMax also reset Token Plan quotas and is running a double-credit sign-in promotion until 7 October.

Why it matters

This is MiniMax's third distinct coding model in under a year, each released while the last was still being benchmarked by others. Ship fast, skip the report, let developers work it out themselves. That is a pattern, not a slip, and most coverage simply repeated the one-line post.