Rui Ma translated a 100-hour inside look at Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi. Here’s what stayed with me.
Kimi has no formal departments, no hierarchy, no titles, no OKRs, and no KPIs. One word comes up over and over inside the company: Taste.
“A genius is not necessarily a top student or model employee. What matters is that in some dimension, they can see through time.” 1
In Silicon Valley, “taste” usually means aesthetic judgment — knowing what good product feels like. The Steve Jobs kind. Kimi means something broader. It’s a combination of aesthetic sense, beginner’s mind, and the ability to see patterns before they become obvious.
Beginner’s mind — shoshin (初心) in Zen Buddhism — is the willingness to approach problems without assumptions, no matter how much experience you have. I think this is one of the things that separates good senior engineers from average ones. Not more knowledge, but less attachment to what they already know.
Testing agentic coding tools despite being skeptical. Questioning whether the capacity problem is actually a planning problem before reaching for Scrum. Looking at what’s there instead of applying the framework you learned five years ago.
It has a cost, though. When I pair with a junior engineer, I try to genuinely think through every question instead of reaching for the answer I already have. That sometimes makes me look unsure. Most seniors perform confidence because it’s expected. Actually thinking in real time reads as hesitation. The insecurity is a side effect — but I’d rather be honestly uncertain than performatively certain.
The article is honest about the downside:
“Without top-down OKRs and KPIs, some mornings you walk into the office not knowing what you should do. No one necessarily tells you whether you are doing well. That lack of feedback creates insecurity.” 1
But flat hierarchy has preconditions. Removing the org chart is not the same as removing the hierarchy. If information doesn’t flow freely, if not everyone shares the same goal, you’ve just made the power structure invisible instead of dismantling it.
And it’s not enough to share information once. It has to flow constantly — like connected brains. The moment information becomes something that’s “passed down” instead of something everyone breathes, you’ve rebuilt the hierarchy you were trying to remove.
Here’s what I think it comes down to: uncertainty without information is paralyzing. Uncertainty with information is fuel. Kimi’s flat structure works not because people aren’t insecure — they are. It works because everyone has what they need to act on that insecurity instead of being frozen by it. I think that’s also why the team names resilience as their most important quality. In a structure like this, you have to be.