MiniMax announced on September 27, 2026, that the M3.1-Flash-Preview model is now available within its product for assisting with code writing in MiniMax Code. This information was confirmed by sources, including IT Home, Startup Fortune, and other developer reviews. The official English name of the product is MiniMax / MiniMax Code.
The main focus of this review is on the in-product coding model and the reasoning controls. However, MiniMax has not yet published a full public specification of parameters or an open API for M3.1-Flash-Preview, so these details cannot be confirmed.
The company's marketing message presents this Preview model as an ultra-fast text model designed for daily development. It is suitable for tasks such as debugging, generating function snippets, handling edge cases, regression testing, and checking the impact of changes, rather than being a new flagship for general chat.
Reviews describe a closed loop operation within MiniMax Code that covers problem localization and implementation, as well as verification through testing and subsequent delivery. Developers who noticed the model in the product list a day before the official announcement were already considering it as an SKU for coding workloads, coexisting with older M3 and M2.7 variants in one interface.
A practical difference noted in the English product reports is the five-level reasoning resource slider, which ranges from low to a new maximum level. This slider allows users to balance computation depth against latency when performing routine or more complex coding tasks. This control is located inside MiniMax Code; the Preview endpoint is described as limited to the company's own tool, not as a widely documented public API in this launch.
Parallel promotions include a Token Plan reset and a verification campaign from September 28 to October 7, which offers double points applicable to code models, including M3.1-Flash-Preview. Users should remember that the M3 architecture and SWE-bench metrics relate to the previous M3 flagship, not automatically to Flash-Preview, until MiniMax releases a specific card.
For coding tool users, the main news is that MiniMax Code has received the Flash-Preview coding model with an explicit reasoning effort slider—a component built into the development environment (IDE), not an open-weights release.


