GLM 5.2 vs. Opus

https://techstackups.com/comparisons/glm-5.2-vs-opus/

by ritzaco • 1 month ago

519 338 1 month ago

So we ran it head-to-head against Claude Opus 4.8: same one-shot prompt, build a 3D platformer in raw WebGL from scratch

Running a single one-shot prompt is not a benchmark, not is it representative of any sort of real-world usage.

Most agent usage is collaborative so you need to test things like reliability (when I delegate a task, does it complete it without making up test results for e.g.) and steerability (does it obey my instructions or does it just do what it thinks is best).

ritzaco• 1 month ago

sure that's why we look at a mix of formal benchmarks, one longer analysis of a side-by-side, and various other people who we trust to form an opinion, all covered in the article - not intended to be a formal benchmark, there are enough of those.

patates• 1 month ago

Then maybe you should add that caveat emptor to the article?

You make a very strong claim at the end that the hype is mostly real, and making it clear to what extent your claim holds should help the reader.

jameswhitford14• 1 month ago

Hi, I am the author, I completely agree! I set out to run a vibe test on this one, not a benchmark, the real benchmarks are listed. My test shows what the models can do when both tasked with a long-running, technically difficult, one-shot task.

I think your test you describe (collaborative, task delegation, task completion, TTD, steerability) is a great format for a future test that I will definitely try out.

meander_water2• 1 month ago

Thanks, I didn't mean to be brusque, but I have seen a lot of these vibe tests lately that come to grand conclusions like "X model is better than Y" from the result of a single prompt.

Appreciate you sharing the results of your tests though!

wongarsu• 1 month ago

Tbf, most of the "real benchmarks" have issues that are just as bad. Assessing LLM performance is just hard

ramraj07• 1 month ago

The important point is that your benchmark is pretty much irrelevant for the actual usage. Thus whatever conclusion you draw is not just irrelevant but misleading.

esperent5• 1 month ago

On the other hand, I did just leave my pi agent running GPT 5.5 overnight on a clearly defined, long running task. It's been running about 10 hours now and it's mostly done. So this kind of use case is also valid.

Thinking about it, I would say that the majority of agentic work I do, by a long shot, is subagents which are launched from the main session, using a prompt of its choosing. Those could be considered short versions of these fully autonomous tasks.

jameswhitford14• 1 month ago

Yes, part of the reason I chose the one-shot test was really to test long-running tasks. A lot of people seem to be experimenting with this format, for example in the now trending loop-writing workflows. And really I am interested in diving into the murky waters of these novel workflows.

thunspa• 1 month ago

Care to share more about your pi setup? I've recently started using it (after long-time Claude Code work) and was wondering how you'd achieve these long-running tasks. Do you allow it to spawn sub-agents? Thank you!

unliftedq• 1 month ago

Totally agree, a single one-shot prompt can't prove anything.

segmondy2• 1 month ago

One shot prompt means you give the model and input, you get an output done. This was not a one shot prompt, but an agentic task as shown by the tool calls.

greyman• 1 month ago

On output tokens, GLM-5.2 is less than a fifth the price of Opus.

Opus is most expensive model in pay as you go model, but IMO fair comparison should include subscription price as well. For example when one has $100 Claude Max and use it up through the month, it might not be more expensive than GLM, or at least not 5x.

lithiumii• 1 month ago

GLM has subscription plans too.

linzhangrun2• 1 month ago

Out of stock, unavailable

fooster4• 1 month ago

There are lots of subscription plans with acccess to GLM 5.2.

jameswhitford14• 1 month ago

Yes this is true. This test was run on a $20 pro Claude subscription. I would definitely love to try use both models on the highest plans for a whole month and compare the two, great format for a future head-to-head comparison.

buster• 1 month ago

Is it fair when the one is heavily subsidized and the other one is not?

I think it's most fair to compare the plain token pricing that is used by everyone.

esperent5• 1 month ago

Is it fair when the one is heavily subsidized

As a consumer, yes, it's totally fair. All that matters to me is the price I pay at the pump, not whether that price is "real" or not.

usef-2• 1 month ago

Z.ai is also believed to be "subsidised". Its parent company is running at a large loss right now.

Anthropic have claimed they expect their first profitable quarter this year -- they may have bigger margins on their raw API than you realise.

fooster4• 1 month ago

I don't think it is fair to say that opus or gpt 5.5 are subsidized? inference for both anthropic and openai are very profitable.

Aozora72• 1 month ago

There is, for example, OpenCode Go subscription, which for $10 a month gives you a decently generous quota of GLM-5.2, among other models.

And z.ai themselves also have subscriptions.

sourcecodeplz2• 1 month ago

to be exact, it gives you USD 60 of usage of open models.

KronisLV• 1 month ago

For example when one has $100 Claude Max and use it up through the month, it might not be more expensive than GLM, or at least not 5x.

https://z.ai/subscribe

I’m currently trying to figure out whether a downgrade from Max 5x to Pro in combination with one of those would save me money and if so, how much.

Edit: seems like Anthropic Pro + GLM Pro (Yearly) would let me almost halve my costs of Anthropic Max 5x. Only concerns are about GLM 5.2 not having vision support and also being kinda slower and also not being as good as Opus.

CuriouslyC5• 1 month ago

I'm considering shifting to the OpenAI $20 plan + GLM. OAI has the best computer use, vision support and the best programming intelligence of any model short of Mythos/Fable, and the quota is a lot more generous than the Anthropic $20 plan.

xlii2• 1 month ago

I've been checking out GLM 5.2 on some projects and few thoughts on it:

- it takes it sweet time to get code rolling, not the fastest model by any means

- it strays a lot during discovery/planning but then corrects

- it's not steering friendly, as it hallucinates things that it doesn't follow later on

- its output is quite good

A sample use case: I was optimizing rendering on Swift+Zig codebase. It chocked on 5k data entries.

GLM 5.2 spent 20 minutes building the benchmarks and getting data out, which made me frustrated so I blocked non-editing tool access and went AFK, after approx. 30 minutes I found that it used already-made benchmarks and some "conclusions" to optimize 3 choke points. Output pointed that it couldn't validate suspicions and asked for more data.

Implementation worked well, it was idiomatic and non-intrusive. I would even say that it was more idiomatic than GPT 5.5 effects on same repo.

I would opt in in using it more BUT GPT usually completes same requests 5x faster.

GLM 5.2 was spark for preparing and running inside isolated containers with JJ workspaces (so that multiple can be ran in parallel).

Imanari• 1 month ago

This mirrors my experience. I have been using it in Pi. It is smart and output is good but it is not efficient in getting there.

ju-st• 1 month ago

which thinking level? max or high?

Oras• 1 month ago

Also pricing, I wanted to give a try, but when pricing is only 30% cheaper than Opus, I wouldn't go for it with these issues.

chpatrick• 1 month ago

It's pricing is a lot cheaper if you can run it yourself.

jeremyjh6• 1 month ago

What?

It is less than 20% of the cost of Opus at API rates. 1.40/4.40 vs 5/25.

nijave5• 1 month ago

z.ai coding plan is a fairly decent deal at ~$16/mon USD considering it's supposed to have a fair bit more usage than the comparable $20/mon Claude plan. On the other hand, z.ai seems a bit on the slower side for raw model tok/sec throughput.

jeremyjh6• 1 month ago

Its also nice that you can see its entire reasoning trace. I can see it going off the rails - or see something I forgot to tell it - and stop and correct it. Or I'll learn WHY it made the choice it did and not have to question it after.

jauntywundrkind2• 1 month ago

Strong agree! I deeply appreciate this aspect of GLM. Watching it think & being able to nudge early is incredibly useful. Being able to point at bad assumptions is incredibly useful. Watching what it's seeing is super informative.

It's always a shock to me how opaque most other models are!

It also is pretty resilience to letting you inject in while it's working without going off course or while getting back on track after, which I appreciate

trollbridge6• 1 month ago

I used it the other day for something of low importance that other models simply weren't figuring out and I didn't want to burn up Opus 4.8 on. (It had to do with overriding left-click on a macOS menu bar and then making Ctrl+click or right click bring up the menu like left-click normally does, and doing all this conditionally.)

Switched the model to GLM-5.2 halfway in the middle of a troubleshooting session (didn't even bother to reprompt, just changed it in the middle of its reasoning), gave it a few minutes, problem fixed. This is with the subscription based allocation on OpenCode Go, where a problem like this would completely burn up my Opus for the current 5 hours or even the current week.

nijave5• 1 month ago

it takes it sweet time to get code rolling, not the fastest model by any means

Which provider are you using? I got a z.ai Lite Coding Plan and it's my understanding z.ai is on the slower side of providers and the Lite plan gets lower priority on top of that. In the api key console, it shows dipping below 60 tok/sec which is quite slow.

xlii2• 1 month ago

I have Max access from a friend. It's not about token generation but time-to-first-edit. It tends to think 3-10 minutes before that.

jkwang• 1 month ago

GLM-5.2 is quietly becoming the most interesting open model release this year. The coding benchmarks are surprisingly close to frontier models at a fraction of the inference cost.

epolanski4• 1 month ago

To me DS 4 is still the most interesting due to much lower costs. Also DS 4 training isn't done yet.

From my Opus vs DS 4 Pro personal benchmarks, 16 different real-life work tasks, DS 4 has performed as well as Opus 4.8 high overall but with few drawbacks:

- on the 16 tasks, one needed several prompts to be steered back into the topic

- its review capabilities seem much worse

- DS4 had the cleanly better solution in 3 cases out of 16, with Opus "only" doing cleanly better 2 times out of 16. But still, I want to emphasize, is the worst case scenarios that imho matter the most, not the best ones, and on that front Opus outperformed.

That being said I spent less than 2$ of API working 4 days, which is more or less what I would've spent with Anthropic APIs for less than one task.

em500• 1 month ago

We've had the great small Qwen 3.6 early April that many could actually run on their laptop. Then similar from Google a few weeks later (Gemma4, better in prose, worse in code). Then the super cheap large Deepseek V4 a few weeks later. Then antirez DS4 build that made that actually runnable on MacBooks and Mac Studios. And now the "near-frontier / near-Opus" GLM 5.2.

For people who follow open LLMs, none of these were quiet and all were the most interesting open model release for a few days/weeks. In one or two months, it will be some other model again. Now I do appreciate the real rapid improvements in open models. But there's also a ton of hype and fast-fashion around all of this.

CuriouslyC5• 1 month ago

The difference here is that those small models are impressive, but not super useful. Deepseek 4 is impressively cheap for the intelligence, but not reliable enough to daily drive unless your time has low value.

GLM passes a meaningful threshold of reliability/utility that puts it in a different category for real work. Just like Opus really took off after passing a threshold with 4.5. It's the first open model to do that.

joshrw• 1 month ago

Chinese models optimize for benchmarks and do poorly in real-world tasks

epolanski4• 1 month ago

Not my experience at all, I have written about comparing DS4 vs Opus 4.8 on 16 real life work tasks on multiple posts.

Also, every single lab does RL on benchmarks, which is why Opus 4.6 was the last truly great assistant, after it, all models tend to drift into implementation asap.

jameswhitford14• 1 month ago

Hi, author here, can you link? I would love to read about this.

IronWolve• 1 month ago

Having issues with coding a render for good looking realistic smoke coming off burning incense, opus 4.8 & gpt-5.5 both have code issues, glm-5.2 did it. Amazing.

The real time 3d fluid dynamics appear to be the tricky part, I wish I still had opus access, would love to see if it can do it.

stavros3• 1 month ago

You mean Fable?

cultofmetatron2• 1 month ago

I seriously dont' know all this big hullabaloo about one shot prompting.

by definition, a single prompt wont' constitute the complexity of a software project. ergo, what you'll get is a series of assumptions made by the model based on preexisting code in its training corpus.

I'd rather see a coding agent that can follow steps in a plan file to a T while following guardrails and adhering to the proper coding conventions in the human reviewed spec.

Id rather see performance in agent loops against human defined objectives where it can be verified to stick to defined guardrails and continue without drift till its objectives are complete.

I'd also like to see it identify bugs and potential performance increases by identifying existing code and suggesting refactors based on context it can pickup about the particular use case you are trying to create.

These are way more valuable metrics than "hey build X"

epolanski4• 1 month ago

Yet this is how virtually everybody is benchmarking and fine tuning.

Since Opus 4.6 I've seen later Anthropic models being more and more capable on one hand, but also less useful on multi turn open tasks.

It feels like with each model they are more and more prone to go "their own way" and jump into the implementation as soon as they can.

I can't but blame it on benchmarks and fine tuning around prompt-to-solution work.

halyconWays• 1 month ago

"We did multi-shot prompting to try and get these two games into comparable states using these two different models."

"Well obviously you provided better follow-up prompts to the one that came out better."

Also nothing about human-provided plan files and guardrails preclude the one-shot benchmark test. Heavens, I almost said "real coding," but in "real agentic program creation" you'd obviously be doing multi-turn interaction with the agent, but how can you provide a fair test when the model's output n determines your n+1 response?

pegasus• 1 month ago

Sure, real-world usage is always more difficult to benchmark, but the additional issue with the one shot prompting benchmark is that by optimizing for it, models are nudged towards making all those assumptions they shouldn't really make. Maybe a better test would be to have a fully spec'd-out plan, but start with a one shot, high-level prompt and expect the agent to discover your preferences by repeatedly asking for clarifications. The system that manages to suss out more of the details in the hidden spec this way, in less steps and with less unnecessary questions would more likely to be a truly well-calibrated agent.

jaapz• 1 month ago

When the model produces reasonable results from one prompt, you could assume that it will also return reasonable results through the follow up prompts.

LoganDark2• 1 month ago

The thing with one-shot prompting is that it tests the ability for the model to make good choices on its own, rather than only instruction following.

Instruction following has been down for years, and while there are of course metrics that continue to improve as the frontier advances (for example, the ability to continue following the original instructions even as context grows), you can't really get that much better at performing a list of instructions as-written if the instructions are sufficiently precise enough that there's no wiggle room for interpretation (which seems to be what you are describing).

For example, one of the things that got me the most excited for Fable 5 was its ability to work for over eight hours straight on a single instruction and seemingly faithfully the entire time. That was something I observed personally after trying out the same workflow that runs for maybe two or three hours with Opus and then still needs followups. Fable needed no followups. That's a game changer for me compared to the prior state of the art.

That kind of stuff is going to end up being the most beneficial to people who are touching the edges of their knowledge or even exploring completely new areas. And that type of work is exactly the kind of work that makes agentic coding so powerful, even as much as it gets harder to judge the quality of the work when you lack the skills yourself. It's a good thing that the quality increases across the board, even for skilled practitioners.

For example, even people who know how to write inference engines or how matmul kernels work or how to optimize model architecture can't always predict just the sheer breadth of things agents can try to improve performance, and sometimes you get over some wall and reach a completely different optimum that you just wouldn't have reached in any reasonable amount of time by applying traditional knowledge even if you're an expert in the field.

That kind of stuff is amazing. And that's exactly the kind of stuff that one-shot prompting is testing for. It's kind of like testing for the model's "innovation", as much of an oxymoron that is.

alienbaby• 1 month ago

It doesn't teat the models ability to make good decisions on its own, it tests the models ability to make something that 'works'. Often you look inside and it does a whole load of questionable things that mostly work, sure, but if you say and designed it properly yourself you would likely come up with something for more sane and maintainable.

Revanche1367• 1 month ago

The argument is flawed, there is no logical reason to assume a single prompt won’t be sufficient to constitute the complexity of a software project. It may not be practical in many cases but there is too much variability in what is considered a complex software project and in the sufficiency of instruction in a single prompt to make that claim and say it’s “by definition.”

dakolli4• 1 month ago

One shot prompting/tooling is the only reasonable way to use an llm in my opinion. You should not be having an LLM operating for hours creating thousands of lines of new code that you can never review or maintain. You can actually be highly productive modifying a single file or two at a time, ideally as focused and little context as possible, without the llm being given full permission to add as much context as possible along the way to maximize revenue for the developers of the harness.

The agentic engineering paradigm is just a narrative trend pushed by AI companies to get people to 10x their token consumption per prompt. It plays into people's laziness and addiction to dopamine too causing addict like behavior in people that fall prey to this trend.

oblio2• 1 month ago

And that prompt will basically be 2000 page spec Bible à la IBM circa 1960, see waterfall. Unless AI develops mindreading (and advanced mindreading at that), single prompt creation of actual complex software products will never happen. You'll one shot a simple non scientific calculator, but not Excel or Vim or Nginx.

pu_pe• 1 month ago

It's true that no one is trying to one shot anything serious right now, but it's still an important metric. Claude Code and Opus really took off when they improved the harnessing enough that it would self-correct many of its mistakes without needing user input. In fact I think long-term autonomy (in the range of several hours) and self-correcting is going to be where we see most improvements in coming years.

dakolli4• 1 month ago

it wont happen, its all a money grab.

bogtog• 1 month ago

In fact I think long-term autonomy (in the range of several hours) and self-correcting is going to be where we see most improvements in coming years.

Right, model intelligence defines the scope of things they can one shot

I also suspect that users naturally calibrate to a model's useful scope, gradually getting positive/negative feedback and gradually making their requests bigger/smaller than before

irthomasthomas• 1 month ago

Blame anthropic, they decided to make these type of one-shot examples the primary focus of the Fable 5 release, and relegating benchmark scores to the pdf.

athrowaway3z• 1 month ago

I think you're underestimating the elegance of "hey build X". It already captures a lot of what you're interested in.

Additionally, with "Hey build X" nobody is happy with the methodology and people rightfully complain about the set up.

Using your suggestion the methodology would require a lot of presumptions & arguments regarding why you choose it and think it relevant to people.

Either people would not "get" it quickly enough or would disagree/not be interested on the setup because its not how they use LLMs.

miroljub2• 1 month ago

That's precisely the difference between an engineer and a business guy.

The business guy would say "hey build me this and that" and would get _something_ to show of.

An engineer will have a long conversation with a llm about the exact requirements, tech stack, tradeoffs. He would understand what is built, how is it built, and refine on the fly until he gets something sensible.

It won't be as fast as "build this", but the result will be much better and more maintainable.

For the enginering workflow, you don't need Fable. Any model better or equivqlent to Sonnet 4.6 would do. Yes, sometimes it will hallucinate, sometimes it'll be wrong, but it's our job as engineers to correct it and have full ownership of the result.

tw19842• 1 month ago

what you said above is only true when the AI is not as smart/professional/knowledgable as that engineer.

scwoodal5• 1 month ago

I'd rather see a coding agent that can follow steps in a plan file to a T while following guardrails and adhering to the proper coding conventions in the human reviewed spec.

Guardrails/conventions should be enforced in linters, formatters, static analysis tooling; not specs/prompts.

Youden• 1 month ago

It's not always possible, or at least trivial. For example how do you enforce "prefer to reuse existing code over making a copy"? Is there a static analysis tool that will detect two pieces of code that do the same thing?

cultofmetatron2• 1 month ago

lets say you have a table that is partitioned. how do you lint/format "any select into this table MUST include the partition key in the predicate and any join must include it in the on." I'm not personally familiar with any static analysis tool that does this but its trivial to implement with an llm prompt. trivially easy to add to your automated PR reviews.

Der_Einzige3• 1 month ago

Wrong, custom "specs" i.e. schemas, are literally all we have for "real" guardrails with LLMs.

https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/structured-out...

Nothing else operates on the logprobs level and literally bans continuations that fail your schema.

ACCount37• 1 month ago

On one hand, that's sort of true for practical uses - and benchmarks notoriously undercount multi-turn settings.

On another, being able to reliably tackle minor tasks with no handholding is very valuable in itself. Sometimes implementation details are important, but often, the most important thing is to Get It Done.

alfiedotwtf• 1 month ago

I think that’s the point of the Superpowers SKILL

NichoPaolucci• 1 month ago

If a model can take a series of increasingly complex instructions and satisfy the requirements without human intervention, we can pretty easily decide how well overall the model does. And, judging better models just means adding more requirements to a task. So, I think it's a useful method (Even if it's not a realistic use case).

Of course, with a software engineer at the helm - the models are going to be able to be guided to produce much better output. (Or worse, depending on the engineer!)

embedding-shape• 1 month ago

You seem to be missing the point of what parent is saying :)

To really evaluate how a model is to use in real life, it should have access to tools, and be able to iterate on something, like they do when you use them in an agent harness.

None of that iteration need necessarily to have a human driving it (although if you're building something you want to be able to maintain, you probably need a human driving the design and architecture), you can just let the model do a couple of tries and give it input into how it's doing, and you get something closer to how people use these models in reality.

locknitpicker• 1 month ago

If a model can take a series of increasingly complex instructions and satisfy the requirements without human intervention (...)

This is the wrong metric to target. Today's models can feel one-shot but they are so at the expense of resilient ReAct loops that brute force their way out of the mess initial prompts created.

And each iteration is expensive.

Sometimes failing fast and early is better than going for one-shot models that try to mitigate the mess they created with reasoning steps and ReAct loops.

scotty79• 1 month ago

Single prompt performance is interesting because best agentic results of yesterday turned out to be best single prompt results of today.

If we stopped developing LLMs the the only reasonable way to benchmark them would be to compare yheir performance with all the tricks we can build on top of them. Sine the are still developing rapidly any apples to apples comparison is worthwhile.

Of course this particular benchmark is not really single prompt but rather "agentic without steering".

losvedir• 1 month ago

One shotting is useful to test but only with a huge prompt (eg, build something according to this spec).

I agree generating millions of tokens from a handful of input tokens doesn't convey anything meaningful to me.

rdsubhas• 1 month ago

IMHO, It's not the oneshotting.

It's the "starting from empty slate" greenfield that's the real problem.

We used to make fun of Engineers who follow a README on a framework, test it on an empty project, and say "this framework is the best for our 10 year running production app". Greenfield mentality is always the solution to all problems and problem to all solutions.

One should still measure oneshotting, it's an important self-measurement metric - but against an established, large codebase.

keheliya• 1 month ago

There are upcoming benchmarks aimed at measuring the ability to work with brownfield tasks. (Of course, benchmarks can be gamed, but they are still better than unrealistic toy tasks that earlier generations of benchmarks used. Frontier labs are yet to use them in their tech reports or marketing material, though.:-)

* SWE-EVO: Benchmarking Coding Agents in Long-Horizon Software Evolution Scenarios https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18470 * SWE-CI: Evaluating Agent Capabilities in Maintaining Codebases via Continuous Integration https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03823

bluGill2• 1 month ago

At least they did some analysis. I've couple AI slop "X is the best tool for the job" that didn't even try it. (Worse, we are already using QT which has a tool for the job, and the QT tool works with the rest of the QT ecosystem unlike whatever AI told them)

dluxem• 1 month ago

I think this (for me at least) is the biggest pain point. Use styles and practices from this existing code base, even if they aren't documented explicitly in AGENTS.md or something. If we're importing a library somewhere that does what the agent is doing, reuse that same library - don't chose another one. If we have a pattern for unit tests, follow the same style. Etc. etc.

That issue, and the issue of "aesthetics", are the biggest complaints I have today. I don't know exactly how to define aesthetics, but it's when AI is making decisions that no experienced developer or designer would. They may be functionally correct but "ugly" to another developer or and end user.

An example is an case I ran in to yesterday where parsing a config, and failing and logging on a configuration error. It logged a specific item where the config was invalid but not what group or any notion of where in the config this error was. Of course, specific item names could be duplicated in different parts of the config. It's small, but correcting these minor things take time and they are the types of decisions no one would have made who had any experience writing code and debugging a config problem. This was Opus 4.8/max too.

ulrikrasmussen3• 1 month ago

I guess the experiment is interesting to determine if a model can produce something subjectively valued as "good" based on fairly vague and open-ended specifications. The benchmark is not to determine if the output fits the input, but whether the output is internally consistent: it's a game, but does it behave as one would expect that any game behaves? Does it end when you each the goal, do you die when hitting the spikes, are there weird edge cases in behavior when you move around?

I think however that they should have used the same harness and also repeated the experiment a few times to judge the variance in results.

hnfong2• 1 month ago

It's a proxy for what you actually want to measure.

Note that after the model generated a bunch of (intermediary) code, they still have to have it tested and get bugs fixed (via the agent/harness). In this "one shot" you still have agent loops against human defined objectives.

And these toy examples give some insight as to how the model performs. If the test were "here's some code written by $corp, please take these tickets and work on them" it may be a "real" example but nobody would be able to make sense of actually how "hard" it is, or how "well" the model did the job, besides the workers already familiar with the context.

At least everyone knows what a 3D game is.

bluGill2• 1 month ago

As someone who works at $corp - there is a massive different in tickets. I've seen "The is not spelled 'teh'", and I've seen some other service is writing to memory causing a crash in my service (the later took months to track down since our code was correct and nothing gives a hint of where to look). Both problems are important to fix, but the first is so simple I don't care how good AI is (the hard part is getting it through the process)

post-it• 1 month ago

The streetlight effect:

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is"

All of your suggestions are better but they're hard, so someone casually evaluating an AI isn't going to do them.

sanderjd2• 1 month ago

Sure, for casual evaluation, I agree. But are there serious analyses that are evaluating this kind of thing? I mean, these are the kinds of things I evaluate in my own work when a new model comes out, or when I'm evaluating a harness. But this is all very ad hoc and intuitional. I'd love to start bringing rigor to it, but I haven't found much prior art on this. In another thread someone said that's because it's probably impossible to do this rigorously because too much of it is subjective. And that does match my intuition. But I continue to suspect that intuition is wrong.

echelon• 1 month ago

The minute an open model breaks through and beats Claude Opus/Fable, it's over.

There are far more opportunities that can be served when the world's intellectuals have the raw weights and can fine tune, splice, distill, and reapply.

Imagine having raw unfettered access to Fable. It can be refit to structural biology. It can be fine tuned on the repo for smaller context requirements. It can be run cheaper and air gapped.

The world wants this.

jatora• 1 month ago

I also love the term zero-shot in the AI benchmark world. So logical. So intuitive.........

gchamonlive• 1 month ago

a single prompt wont' constitute the complexity of a software project.

The top agent is for steering, but all subagents are mostly oneshot prompts

somenameforme• 1 month ago

Unless I'm missing something, the prompt he gave must have been fairly detailed because both games are basically identical.

But for a more practical issue, the ultimate goal of LLMs is to replace software engineers, or at least enable everybody to become a software engineer, to use a more up-beat phrasing that's no less accurate. And so an LLM's ability to reliably construct something from a poorly defined, contradictory, or otherwise flawed prompt, while accurately inferring intent is probably the first finish line.

metadat• 1 month ago

More likely is the models were trained on similar data.

throwawayffffas3• 1 month ago

It's the same prompt but they also gave them the same asset pack.

InsideOutSanta3• 1 month ago

I seriously dont' know all this big hullabaloo about one shot prompting.

It's a relatively objective way of testing LLMs, and I think it's pretty representative of how strong models are overall.

The outcome of this test mirrors how GLM 5.2 and Opus 4.8 work for me: they're both similarly capable of fully executing a given task, but Opus tends to have a bit more "taste" in how it handles unstated details or implicit requirements.

what you'll get is a series of assumptions made by the model

Yes, but that's why we use these models in the first place. We don't want to explicitly write down all the details because that would mean writing code. So we write a higher-level, human-language spec, and let the LLM fill in the blanks. The question is how good they are at doing that.

moistoreos• 1 month ago

PREACH. I have no idea why THIS has become the standard for illustrating model capabilities. It's endlessly frustrating when that was the initial objective for all these models, but, became increasingly clear over time that none of these models were ever capable of getting the desired output for complex software on the initial prompt.

The reality is: - business rules change - ideas for improvement may arise from the initial prompt - updates to submodules/functions/configs/secrets are BLOCKERS ... etc.

One shot prompting for the expecations of complete software is seemingly more and more a show of incompetence of the use of this technology. It's like trying to make my toddler eat a ham sandwich from the peanut butter & jelly I put in front of him.

throw234234234• 30 days ago

My opinion is that it is because the measure isn't aimed at technical people. It's aimed at clients that just want to specify what they want -> then get what they want without an engineer. They are pitching to their investors, VC's, etc who just want to "will their stuff into existence" without engaging professional staff. Their end goal isn't augmentation, or a faster tool. It's replacement of expertise and capturing of that value to the AI labs. Similar to how I would love a new house to be magically built just by prompting it without having to engage anyone; or follow the process. Its great for marketing having the AI genie.

johnfn• 1 month ago

I feel like on HN there is an endless cycle:

- Vibes are too subjective, I want an actual A/B test!

- An A/B test is too limited, I want a benchmark! (You are here.)

- Those benchmarks never seem to be reliable, I just go on vibes.

digitaltrees6• 1 month ago

Exactly this. I recently tried Claude code again to get the subsidy on fable rather than paying api prices and was so frustrated by how much it pushed autonomous behavior. It would start ignoring my planning documents, ignoring my coding conventions, reimplementing features and code already in the project (not sure it ever makes sense to have two auth systems in parallel or two websocket implementations for the same ui) and then in the most shocking interaction just refused to stop working and listen to my instructions. I think maybe it was because there was a subagent doing the work but it was a complete waste of time and effort.

I was using cursor, in large part because I could at least stop it when I need to.

I ended up building my own IDE from scratch so I can be more in the loop while also having the full agent experience.

gertlabs2• 1 month ago

One-shot performance often translates to the most difficult problems a model will be able to understand. We run an evaluation that tests both agentic and one-shot performance, and we find that Chinese models are almost universally very good at using tools and a harness to iterate towards a better solution, whereas their initial response ranks relatively low.

Compare that to Gemini models, which have impressive fluid intelligence on the first response, but fail to call tools or explore correctly which limits their usefulness for agentic coding.

Neither will be great for coding in a computational chemistry repo for different reasons, but the model with strong one-shot performance will be less likely to make subtle errors indicative of poor understanding, so we weight both capabilities into their final score.

The latest Anthropic and OpenAI models excel in both domains.

Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings

mycall• 1 month ago

The latest Anthropic and OpenAI models excel in both domains.

Is that because OpenAI models are not a single model but a cluster of models which specialize different domains?

canes123456• 1 month ago

Isn't a plan file just a single long prompt?

hintymad• 1 month ago

I'd rather see a coding agent that can follow steps in a plan file to a T while following guardrails and adhering to the proper coding conventions in the human reviewed spec.

In fact, I'd rather see Anthropic publish a convincing project that does this using Claude. The project should be complex enough and novel enough to show the world how reliable and powerful Claude is. That is, Anthropic does not need Amodei or its employees to tell us that whatever percent of engineers will lose their jobs. They can just show us. Easily.

segmondy2• 1 month ago

What are you yapping about? This was not one shot prompting, but a long run horizon task. But GLM and Opus invoked at least 120+ tools across the runs.

Demiurge• 1 month ago

The bigger head scratcher to me isn’t even one prompt, it is the prompt to build a platformer from scratch. Who does that? Absolutely no one.

What about: take top 3 feature requests, top 3 bug reports for 3 popular open source projects and ask to solve those based on the issue contents and access to the project repos.

Even if you stay in a single prompt scenario, you could make it more realistic.

throwawayffffas3• 1 month ago

While I generally agree, there is correlation, will it go into doom loops? Will it overthink obvious bugs? Will it hallucinate libraries and apis? If it does all that in the one shot prompt it will do it in your codebase as well. Yeah state of the art models won't do all that. But that was not the case only 6 months ago, and doing the one shot prompting demonstrates ti does not do all of the above. It's a quick first real easy to clear test, really.

linzhangrun2• 1 month ago

Just that their Coding Plan is too hard to get. I've been trying to grab it for a week and still can't get it

Aozora72• 1 month ago

I used GLM 5.0/5.1/5.2 for some projects, and for me, the area in which they lag behind frontier models the most are user interfaces. They get really close to Opus when it comes to pure algorithms, but when I need something like web application or a mobile app that looks and works well, they are very noticeably worse than even Sonnet.

david_shi• 1 month ago

GLM-5.2 cost a fraction as much. Opus finished in half the time and shipped a cleaner game.

Off topic, but does anyone else instantly pick up on LLMisms like this? It seems like all the models have converged on this style of writing, and improvements aren't really changing it.

speedgoose2• 1 month ago

I think a bunch of real humans started to adopt the LLMs writing style.

himata4113• 1 month ago

Yep, as I reread my own sentances I notice these LLMisms and have to rewrite them quite often. Reading so much llm-output definitely impacts your writing style.

lelele• 1 month ago

Indeed. I'm trying to develop a similar style. The phrasing in the quoted passage is really tight.

VulgarExigency• 1 month ago

Yes, and it's really grating. It's like half of all new writing is done in the same "voice" now.

jameswhitford14• 1 month ago

This is excellent feedback thank you! These LLMisms in writing are a challenge I am living with currently and trying to improve on. The technical writing industry is taking a huge knock right now with companies demanding more work in less time with a big drop in quality, day to day I get less and less time to work on the quality in the prose of my work. We are working at the frontier of this right now, so we are the most heavily effected, but also get to experiment with the changes first which can be both stimulating and very frustrating.

yard2010• 1 month ago

I cannot unsee it.

There was this dude here not long ago who bought like $70k worth of gpus to research, and if I'm not mistaken his research was something related to make llms sound less llm-y. I wonder how it goes for him.

nijave5• 1 month ago

Yes, especially if I know the person/have heard them talk before.

leumon• 1 month ago

I've seen glm 5.2 struggle writing simple compilable c code. It might be good at web, but it's world knowledge is limited due to the small model size, making it's use quite limited in my opinion.

speedgoose2• 1 month ago

While this is interesting, one single sample with different coding harness is not very scientific.

jameswhitford14• 1 month ago

Yes I agree 100%. My next guide would do better to use identical harnesses.

ulrikrasmussen3• 1 month ago

Through an API it costs a fraction of Opus, and you can run it yourself for free if you have the hardware.

I haven't been keeping up on hardware costs for state of the art LLM inference, but this remark made me ask myself how many readers of the article would actually be able to run this model on hardware they own. How much would it cost to acquire such a setup?

jack_pp• 1 month ago

This framing local LLMs as free is stupid. Basically pay 100+ months worth of API costs up front isn't free in the slightest. And it will be slower than non-local, your hardware will be outdated in 12 months and probably won't be able to run SOTA at anywhere near non-local speed in max 20 months

ulrikrasmussen3• 1 month ago

Yeah, it glosses over a gigantic capital expenditure. It's sort of like saying that an open source modern CPU architecture allows you to build your own CPU "for free" (provided that you own and operate a fab).

cicko• 1 month ago

True. But there are other meanings of "free". I.e. nobody can say "from now on you no longer have access to model X because you're an asshole"

throwaway219450• 1 month ago

Hardware outdated in 12 months is FUD. What that would mean in practice would be either affordable consumer GPUs with > 32GB of VRAM, which doesn't look like it's going to happen, or unified memory systems with much higher bandwidth. That also seems unlikely.

You're better off setting a budget and buying the best machine you can afford in that range, or picking a VRAM target and accepting the class of models you can run on it. Those models will almost certainly improve over time and your skills will adapt to the limitations. Hardware is so valuable right now that it's not even likely to be a significant loss if you had to sell.

Right now I think 24 GB is probably the best bang for your buck (used 3090), because you also get a high end gaming/gpgpu device which is nice anyway. 32 GB you can do with AMD or Intel, but NVIDIA is megabucks and at this point you're really paying for RAM. Unfortunately the ship has sailed on "reasonably" priced RTX 6000s, which at one point were about $7k and are being listed at $10k++.

yieldcrv• 1 month ago

and I think asking for a whole dissertation on the hardware demands every single time is stupid. the point is that even people and organizations with capital couldn't do this before either.

if it doesn't apply to you then just come back in a couple years and see what the situation is then. 1 million context window, 1 million tiny layers to fit in 4gb RAM at a time, with 256gb of fast unified RAM in every consumer device? Or a different concept entirely

in the meantime, z.ai probably doesn't reply to US subpoenas so you can shift all your incriminating conversations over to that and use GLM anyway. who cares if the Party trains on your data and steals your IP and ignores you for legal matters, when the alternative in the US is just a thin corporate layer and party who steals your IP and will snitch on you for legal matters.

crimsoneer• 1 month ago

Practically nobody.

bestouff• 1 month ago

The price of a small house.

trollbridge6• 1 month ago

GLM-5.2 performing like it would from a good provider - 8x B200s, so $450k. (No personal experience here)

GLM-5.2, severely quantised, 512GB Mac Studio, somewhere between $10k-$35k for a used M3. Or run it on a CPU with 768GB of RAM by getting an old PowerEdge with DDR4 for around $5,000.

Qwen-3.6-35b-q6, runs well on an RTX 5090 ($4000 + cost of a PC), runs medicore on an Intel Arc B70 ($1000 + cost of a PC plus lots of fiddling to get the setup to work right).

Gemma is a good candidate for the cheaper stuff, but I lack personal experience with using it locally

trollbridge6• 30 days ago

For anyone reading this, GLM-5.2 is actually a lot more accessible than that on the 1 or 2 bit quantised models - see https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/glm-5.2

Basically a 1x 24GB GPU (32GB would be better) plus 256GB of free system RAM, or a 256GB unified memory machine (like a Mac).

Kind of shocked they got the results they did.

csomar• 30 days ago

Holy AI, this shit is expensive. I was a bit suspect (no experience too) so I run some Claude calculations and it's also giving me a $350-450k to run GLM-5.2 at full precision (un-quantized). For rental on Azure, it's giving me $96–$144/hr. That translates to $22/M tokens which way more expensive than API pricing at z.ai. To get close to API pricing, you have to seek cheaper providers but that only gets you close to z.ai pricing not lower.

Caveat here is that all of this is Claude math, but would be interested in someone more knowledgeable of the math chiming in. I was thinking that API pricing was highly inflated in order to cover subscription costs but with these calculations it might be not?

zkmon• 1 month ago

Cost difference matters most as cost optimization is the whole point of AI. Time difference (30 min vs 1 hr) is not a deal-breaker. The small precision gap on the first iteration does not matter for 99% of the work that happens in real world.

jameswhitford14• 1 month ago

Yes I 100% agree. Time-taken can be improved (with harnesses, subagent workflows etc.) and varies based on task.

TurdF3rguson• 1 month ago

Pretty clearly it's beating Opus at [web dev](https://www.gptbased.com/) - on price, on score.. I mean what else is there?

trick-or-treat2• 1 month ago

Latency? Just saying there's other things to consider.

jofzar3• 1 month ago

I hate to be that guy, but real privacy policy on training data/it being hosted somewhere where I'm not worried about secrets being stored/leaked.

HPsquared• 1 month ago

Open weights win on that front surely?

Havoc2• 1 month ago

Realistically you’d need to rotate secrets anyway once it moves from dev to production regardless of model provider

dkersten• 1 month ago

Its on other providers, like Together.ai

CuriouslyC5• 1 month ago

2016 me would agree, but 2026 me looks at Trump and Dario, and at China, sees basically no ethical difference (or possibly even an ethical deficit for America) and considers that perhaps it's better to go with the option that isn't trying to hoodwink me with bullshit platitudes and flag waiving while doing whatever they want in actuality.

neonstatic• 1 month ago

I'm sorry, is this criticism of Z.AI and China or Anthropic and the US? Not that there is much of a difference these days..

myaccountonhn• 1 month ago

Article states it's not multimodal. I guess that means for webdev it means you can't take a screenshot to indicate errors etc.

msejas• 1 month ago

Seeing the results I don't see how the results are even comparable Opus is clearly far superior in most aspects. Smoothness, design, functionality etc.

At the end of the day, the time earned is more important then the cost for big players.

The ability to spawn 10 claude agents and rush a project to outcompete someone is more important for big businesses in my imo. Also the small details that GLM missed would take significant more time to iron out, considering it already took double the time.

I do hope other (open weight) models catch up, but to act like they are anywhere close for me is a bit disingenuous.

close2• 1 month ago

I wonder how much tokens and time where used for the verifying part. Maybe GLM 5.2 instantly found the "solution" to read the screen pixel by pixel, but it could also have been a major token and time consumer.

trick-or-treat2• 1 month ago

I could be wrong but I believe this is a non-vision model. Please weigh in to correct me bc I would love to be wrong

jameswhitford14• 1 month ago

GLM 5.2 is text only, not multi modal. And Opus is multi modal.

jameswhitford14• 1 month ago

Hi, author here, I cannot give an exact number for how many token the verification step took, but the verification GLM 5.2 ran was very stupid and definitely a waste of time. It read the pixel color data to try and verify the scene rendered properly. Which is really bad. Opus opened the game in a Playwright browser and took screenshots to verify the actual image. Which helped a lot.

Pro tip: You could use a multi-modal model to verify images as a subagent spawned by GLM 5.2, to get around this issue.

59nadir• 1 month ago

That's a dumb way to do it, it should just write the frame buffer to a PNG instead of taking screenshots. I guess you can't take the dumb web developer ways out of these models at the end of the day.

jofzar3• 1 month ago

Great article,

My only, I guess feedback, is that it's not really clear about the price.

Would the 21.92 be the API pricing I guess?

Cost $5.39 (real billed) ~$21.92 (estimate, list pricing)

postatic• 1 month ago

I've signed up with Ollama to experiment with these open source models. For the past 3 months, it's just been experimenting, trying it out. GLM is the first model that I am using on a daily basis to do my coding work (as well as using Claude). It's good - I've been maxing out my Ollama usage limits everyday :)

jameswhitford14• 1 month ago

Cool to hear, what kind of tasks have you been using GLM for? And what other models have you found useful through Ollama?

_pdp_• 1 month ago

In the name of science we crafted an autonomous AI agent that builds games on a loop. It is based on GLM 5.2.

I am not sure where this is going to lead us but it is fun to watch.

sourcecodeplz2• 1 month ago

What is this fashion of testing models by giving them one shot projects? Especially games. this is so stupid

wejick• 1 month ago

Totally agree witg the general assessment. The biggest problem with Z.ai model for a long time is not quality, but the inference speed and general capacity availability. Hopefully with this recent hype, there will be more provider on openrouter for 5.2.

pietz2• 1 month ago

GLM 5.2 has one big issue that will limit its meaningful success and that's the value of their coding subscription.

Yes, in terms of API pricing, GLM 5.2 outperforms the competition. But the only people that use API billing for their coding work are large corporations, where these highly subsidized subscriptions are being fazed out.

At the same time, none of these companies will use a Chinese API for their employees.

For individuals and smaller teams, Z.ai's coding subscription is outperformed by Anthropic and OpenAI. You probably get around the same usage with Claude, but Codex definitely offers more usage for the amount you pay.

We can have a debate how much Z.ai closed the gap to GPT5.5 and Opus 4.8, but if I can freely decide between them in a world where they all cost the same, I simply wouldn't choose GLM.

So the important question becomes: How good will the offering from Z.ai get with GLM 5.3 or 6 and how much will OpenAI and Anthropic cripple their current offering in the near future.

Certhas2• 1 month ago

My impression is that individual subscriptions are the loss leading hook. The money is made on Enterprise token contracts.

Employees and students used to coding with thousands of dollars worth of tokens (on a 20/100 dollar plan) will push enterprise to spend.

Having a Chinese model that is competitive won't displace this enterprise spend. But an open model hosted in the US/EU might.

The existence of GLM 5.2 puts a ceiling on how much OpenAI/Anthropic can charge for API Access.

pietz2• 1 month ago

To be clear, I agree with this and they have my unlimited support pushing for relevance of open source models. GLM 5.2 is amazing and I couldn't be more excited.

I just think that as of today, most people will not find a good reason to switch to GLM.

LUmBULtERA4• 1 month ago

My impression is that individual subscriptions are the loss leading hook

Except there is no evidence of this at all, just people comparing API and subscription pricing. The leaked financial info for OpenAI shows inference is profitable right now, though it does not show a distinction between subscription and API revenue... but if subscription revenue was so lossy, it would hard for total inference to still be profitable.

fbnszb• 1 month ago

The existence of GLM 5.2 puts a ceiling on how much OpenAI/Anthropic can charge for API Access.

I believe this is the reason why we can even have this debate. Without this kind of competition we would not have these subsidies.

edg5000• 1 month ago

This is an important point. I suspect API pricing will eventually disappear just like how paying for an MMS disappeared. It's an antiquated model. The bulk of the work is being done on "coding plans" is my wild guess.

It's annoying that the plans are so restrictive beyond usage limits. Understandable maybe, but annoying. In practice, only Anthropic (and maybe Google) are really restrictive though. They really scared me away with their policy of charging API rates after the fact if they consider your usage not TOS-aligned. This might be an ungrounded fear that I have, but I feel this is something they'd do so they scared me away.

twobitshifter3• 1 month ago

Taking a view from outside the USA, European companies just had Fable taken away due to US export controls, and before that Anthropic announced it is holding their data for 30 days. There is immediate value to these firms to build their infrastructure around an AI that won’t be pulled away from them. And outside of Europe, other countries are more price sensitive and don’t have the same fear of building relationships with Chinese companies.

SubiculumCode• 1 month ago

And you have that guarantee from Xi?

WarmWash• 1 month ago

There is no such thing as a relationship with "chinese companies". In China there is just the State, and that is it.

If the world needs any more evidence of Europe's short-sightedness, it would be them running to China to spite the US (instead of creating fertile grounds for their own tech).

jauntywundrkind2• 1 month ago

I'm on glm pro subscription and I get so so so much more usage than Claude or Codex! I hammer on glm all day. It's a more expensive plan, but I would need a much much much bigger plan for codex or Claude to do what I do.

tpm• 1 month ago

Also, I was testing out the GLM 5.2 using Openrouter because that's where I've got an account with some money and then when I wanted to perhaps subscribe for a better deal at z.ai, their infra was clearly overloaded to the point the 5.2 was timing out on 100% of chat requests, so perhaps I will try later when the infrastructure catches up with the model capability. Only then I can make sure their subscription is worth it.

HarHarVeryFunny• 1 month ago

But the only people that use API billing for their coding work are large corporations

As well as people using 3rd party harnesses like OpenCode.

At the same time, none of these companies will use a Chinese API for their employees

So who are Amazon Bedrock (who serve GLM) targetting?

Individuals are presumably going with one of the cheaper US providers such as DeepInfra ($0.18/M cached input for GLM vs $0.50 for Opus) or Fireworks AI.

tw19842• 1 month ago

At the same time, none of these companies will use a Chinese API for their employees.

nice try but you intentionally ignored the entire Chinese market & Chinese big corporates. there are 130 Chinese companies in the fortune 500 list, with an average revenue of 80 billion USD each. do you think they are going to sign up for Claude, Codex or GLM? now consider South East Asia, Africa, Middle East, Middle Asia and South America, tell me why their large corporates won't be using GLM API billings?

your western centric view of the world is totally out of date, like it or not, 2026 is vastly different from 1996, the US no longer controls high tech whatsoever.

veber-alex• 1 month ago

The value of these models is that you can run them on your own hardware.

A company can buy a NVIDIA B300 and serve it's developers in house with unlimited tokens.

xg15• 1 month ago

So GLM emits fewer tokens and does fewer tool calls, but still takes over twice as long to complete.

Can someone explain to me where that time usage is coming from if not from the model operation itself?

Are the individual tool calls more complex and take more time to complete? Or is the rate of tok/s lower because the model does more compute per token?

radu_floricica• 1 month ago

Could just be infra. I'm betting Anthropic is much better prepared.

iagooar• 1 month ago

I have noticed that Opus and GPT 5.5 are very good at adjusting their thinking / reasoning intensity depending on the task at hand, something the open weights models are still not as good at.

In addition to that, some of the open weights models like GLM 5.2 or DeepSeek v4 Pro tend to be MUCH slower when generating tokens, which contributes to the perceived slowness. Although I wouldn't call models like GLM 5.2 slow by any means, e.g. it is currently one of the fastest models inside Notion today.

twobitshifter3• 1 month ago

Probably the data center where the model is running more than anything. Another option is if Opus is using anything like a Mixture of Experts approach, in which case the amount of the model loaded in memory at one time could be smaller than GLM.

yanhangyhy• 1 month ago

i think GLM 5.2 is not cheap and not easy to get the coding plan... so even it's on the Opus level... still not attractive.

jiri• 1 month ago

opencode zen go?

LUmBULtERA4• 1 month ago

How is it not easy to get the coding plan?

Mashimo• 1 month ago

I used GLM (4.7, 5 and 5.1) both through their coding plan and now through OpenCode zen. Both where painless to get.

Havoc2• 1 month ago

Still on a z.ai legacy plan and their 50% discount for switching to standard plans tips the balance for me. So I guess I’ll reevaluate round about beginning 2028…

ukprogrammer• 1 month ago

GLM cannot use vision like Opus can. This is not a useful comparison.

jameswhitford14• 1 month ago

I see your point. Just the fact that one model does have vision and one does not might be an interesting point of comparison, however.

taosu_la• 1 month ago

I'm really feeling a bit tired of these models. I feel that since opus 4.1, I haven't been able to clearly feel the intelligence improvement from the model upgrades (except for gpt 5.5 and opus4.6 being able to speak like a human)

camillomiller• 1 month ago

I swear, if I read forms with “genuinely” one more time I am gonna scream. FUCK LLM WRITING

jameswhitford14• 1 month ago

I hear you

schmorptron• 30 days ago

i love that word, and now it's genuinely (hehe) ruined. thanks, claude

poulpy123• 1 month ago

What would the best way to use these open source models for a price similar to what I could pay for the cheapest plan with claude and openai ?

I would like to give them a try but I certainly not have the money to get a system able to run them, and I don't really want to pay more than the state of the art

_s_a_m_• 1 month ago

GLM is the most overrated LLM. I tried it and it not good.

CuriouslyC5• 1 month ago

You should repeat this experiment but with progressively more detail in the initial prompt. Claude's secret sauce is taking weakly specified prompts and making passable things from them, but as the degrees of freedom in the prompt go down Claude starts to disobey while other models close in on the intent.

jameswhitford14• 1 month ago

That is a great suggestion that I am definitely going to look into, thanks!

Babooz• 1 month ago

Nice comparison, but perhaps a more informative one would be to keep the harness the same and use Claude Code for both model. In your comparison, the differences could be due to many harness design decisions.

js4ever• 1 month ago

"GLM-5.2 hit a problem here, because it can't read images. It isn't multimodal. So instead of looking at a screenshot, it fell back on a hacky workaround: it wrote scripts to read the raw pixel data and check whether the colors came out roughly as expected."

A better way would be to use https://github.com/openbmb/MiniCPM-V

twobitshifter3• 1 month ago

Right, just give the text llm access to a vision specific agent and that problem can be solved. Or if you really want let it even call Opus with an image - seems like you’d still save money

thedreammachine• 1 month ago

I was surprised today by how much better GLM-5.2 was than GPT-5.5 at aesthetic/UI work. I'll keep my Claude/Codex setup via Conductor for now, but this model got me to set up OpenCode, download their desktop app and do most of my work there today.

aykutseker• 1 month ago

The text only part is the catch for me.

If it builds a UI and can't look at it, it's askin ls whether the app looks right.

hmokiguess3• 1 month ago

I signed up for GLM 5.2 yesterday to try it out because Anthropic kept throwing 529 Overloaded

I like it, but the lite plan ate 22% usage of my 5h reset window in a single session after 2 prompts on xhigh of GLM 5.2 [1m]

Result was satisfactory, I think stuff is decent, I'm happy to use either, wish there was a combined subscription plan where I could get both

w4yai4• 1 month ago

I may be biased and interested as I'm going to give you an affiliate link, but really honestly Synthetic LLM provider is a beast! They provide perfect GLM5.2, awesome token/s, TTFT and price.

Coupled with a local Headroom (https://github.com/headroomlabs-ai/headroom) you'll be able to use a LOT without hitting your 5h window :)

Definitely the best $ value for me considering the reasonable performance of GLM5.2.

They provide a rolling window quota, so you're never really out of quota contrary to other providers, you can adjust day to day.

Check it out if interested : https://synthetic.new/?referral=kwjqga9QYoUgpZV

---

Docs & all models : https://dev.synthetic.new/docs/api/models

hmokiguess3• 1 month ago

how do I configure claude code / pi with it? sounds like a good deal!

EDIT: I've RTFM lol, thanks for the links, will give it a shot!

wolttam• 1 month ago

Would have run it with GLM on max/xhigh effort. Just for fun.

maccard• 1 month ago

Are these games supposed to be a good example of quality output? If this is the product, I don't really want to play _either_ of them.

maxdo• 1 month ago

So the benchmark is : Two models with different harness produced very different results .

Glm game was completely broken Opus game was at first glance ok but also with bugs

Different models with different cost produced different non perfect results . How is it “close” ? :)

Also on costs : glm burns more tokens on average vs opus . Gpt5.5 burns less surprisingly

orloffm• 1 month ago

256 GiB unified RAM.

So, 8000$, plus it's unavailable. 3 years of Codex/Opus subscription.

API prices

Which are irrelevant for 200$ Codex/Opus plans that are times cheaper.

wiremine2• 1 month ago

I've been using GLM 5.2 extensively for the last few days. It is slower, and the lack of multimodality is a bummer.

But, it produces solid results for a fraction of the price. Worth checking out if you have the time.

One of my goto "tests" of a new frontier models is having it rebuild a programming language from scratch. For GLM 5.2 I had it rebuild the old Rebol language in Rust:

https://github.com/mhs/rebol-clone-glm-5.2

It did a fairly good job roughing in the language for a low token cost.

efficax• 1 month ago

glm-5.2 is very good if you have a good harness and workflow to use it with. in fact, i'd call it good enough if you are a software engineer who knows what you want. it writes the code. i'm wondering if i need anthropic's models at all at this point, or openai. and surely in a year we won't need them at all. Opus 4.5+ was the turning point for me, and now these open models are just as good. i don't get how you IPO these companies when their only winning product is coding agents and the competition is just as good for 1/4 the price.

toddmorey• 1 month ago

I’m actually amazed at the output since GLM doesn’t have eyes. If GLM 5.2 costs 1/5 as much, seems like it could be set up to reach out to a multimodal model for vision tasks when required. Closer to parity but probably still significantly cheaper.

horsawlarway• 1 month ago

I'm also very impressed at the output given the lack of image support.

They picked a task that heavily favors a model that can do multi-modal with images, and GLM still came within striking distance.

What I'm hearing from this article is that the next generation of open models that includes better multi-modal support are basically no-brainers for adoption.

Seems like a HUGE win for Z.ai and open models in general here.

killingtime74• 30 days ago

Yes, it could just make one call to a multimodal llm to describe the scene

NicoJuicy• 1 month ago

For those praising GLM 5.2, can anyone confirm?

Tried with 2 harnesses and it seems bad + slow

jdright• 1 month ago

not apples to apples. comparing official vs. pi.dev+openrouter and having slow times is more a openrouter issue. try comparing using official z.ai.

samsin• 1 month ago

My understanding was that n-shot prompting just referred to the number of examples included in a prompt, not the number of prompts to achieve the desired result.

"Build a 3D platformer game from scratch, in raw WebGL, with no game engine or 3D library" would be a zero-shot prompt.

xrd• 1 month ago

How are people running this locally? I just checked llama.cpp and it appears unsloth has a version but it hacks a bunch of things to make it work and isn't optimal.

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/issues/24730

jeremyjh6• 1 month ago

No one is doing that for a model this size it would have to be so heavily quantized that it wouldn’t be useful - or you’d need to spend a half million dollars on hardware. People use hosted APIs. Open weight means cloud vendors can host it.

malshe3• 1 month ago

Can you recommend any US based cloud providers?

cwoolfe• 1 month ago

The model is 756B parameters, open weights.

stevenhubertron• 1 month ago

No one has really talked about hybrid and using Opus to plan and orchestrate GLMs work both through initial build and code reviews. That’s a true best of both worlds and there doesn’t need to be a winner.

jeremyjh6• 1 month ago

This is the way but Anthropic doesn’t make it easy, so I use GPT 5.5 in that role since I can use my subscription in OpenCode or OMP.

I also use MiniMax-M3 in utility roles like explore/library tasks.

I’ve had a z.ai subscription for several months so I’m on the older pricing. I’m really not sure it would make sense to do this at current rates - I could bump my Codex plan instead.

mattew• 1 month ago

I mostly use Opus for skill development. Once I have a solid skill implementation with a good eval, I move ongoing execution to a cheaper model running under Goose. With the eval you can see if the cheaper model works well enough.

stavarotti• 1 month ago

These style of comparisons are decent at showing capability but they don't really show me what I truly want - a sounding board and implementer with senior engineer-level execution. When I look back at all the teams that I've been part of, the best outcomes came from white-boarding (sometimes in the metaphorical sense) with one or two people, at times arguing, then finally compromising on a plan. Instead of synthetic benchmarks that try to be objective, I wonder if there's a way test this, or maybe I'm opining on a way of working that will soon be gone?

elzbardico• 1 month ago

If you are a real engineer and uses the LLM as a pair programmer instead of delegating everything to it, even GLM 4.7 was already good enough to help you with a lot of work.

I used it with Cerebras inference at a time when it had a good coding plan at a low price, and delivered tons of stuff using it.

lukaslalinsky3• 1 month ago

I was never able to get these models to collaborate with me the way Opus does. I'm probably an outliner, I don't one-shot projects, I don't vibe code. I basically use LLMs are if I was working with a coworker, fairly smart one, but with short memory and often missing the big picture. Sometimes I can delegate more, sometimes less, but I know I always have to stay on top of what's happening, because it WILL create mess when it hits something hard. With the Antropic models, this kind of cooperation is easy (with the exception of Opus 4.6, which was bad for some reason).

Terretta• 1 month ago

Opus 4.6 which was bad for some reason

If I recall, that model had a couple issues. One was the issue of being monkeyed with, for which they gave everyone credits.

The other feature/bug, depending on your POV, was being Anthropic's least personable release, not papering over everything with self help guru therapy language.

Opus 4.6 didn't LARP. It was more direct, less fussy, less discussy, and very much less "wait, one more thing" within a couple edits after embarking on what should have been the spec, than 4.7 or 4.8 are.

When in engineer brain mode, working as as you describe (good old fashioned XP-style staff engineer pair programming with a language-savvy mentee not yet full-stack or system wise), I found the clearer I was about my goal and the better I could express it, the more often I'd get an expanded clarified response I could then iterate to steer for ever tighter cleaner more specified responses, then let it go build the whole thing without it agonizing and waffling.

The next two releases regressed on that dimension, wanting to figuratively "sit with" every decision and re-validate spiritual alignment along the way, no matter how clearly expressed.

Curiously to me, Fable seemed to hit the best of both worlds, I had the highest commit per turn with Fable, approaching 73%, where I'm usually under 17% of LOC written being good enough to commit, usually taking 9 - 11 turns to get the code where I'm comfortable with it.

Thanks to this, Fable cost more, but actually cost less, if that makes sense.

Arguably, Fable, and 4.6, played more outcome-correctness oriented than journey-experience oriented. It's easy to see how this could happen with human reinforced learning if not all judges are staff or principal engineer level, or constitution values are more Portlandia than Finlandia.

ANTHROP\C needs to balance these at the constitution level:

“We will work in a humane and thoughtful way, but production is the final judge. We will listen to people, but we will not let discussion replace decision. We will value craft, but not at the expense of usefulness. We will move fast, but not by hiding risk. We will measure outcomes, but not pretend that everything important is easy to measure.”

lukaslalinsky3• 1 month ago

I considered Opus 4.5 to be the peak for a while. Opus 4.6 tended to over think, and generally get lost in thinking. I asked something and Claude Code would just spin for 15 minutes. And it was not the harness, if I changed the model to 4.5, it was fine again. So I skipped the following releases. I've been working with Opus 4.8 the last weeks and while I don't like how talkative it is, but it is fine to work with interactively. I've also used Fable for the few days it was available, and indeed, that was model worth using for my use case. To the point, but still very interactive.

therealdrag0• 1 month ago

What do they do instead of collaborating?

x312• 1 month ago

A lot of open weight models don't understand intent well, they'll overfixate on a word in the prompt or just go off the rails trying to do much work.

GLM-5.2 actually has really good intent understanding though, on par with GPT-5.5 and Opus from my experience.

lukaslalinsky3• 1 month ago

I'll have to try it. I was using earlier GLM models, incluing 5.1, and was always disappointed.

doe88• 1 month ago

To me one shot prompting is as relevant as Strava's KOM is for cycling, i'm more interested in a good cycling performance after a 3 hours ride than a straight up 30 min record effort.

lordforever• 1 month ago

i think inference is the thing, that also fast inference, so enterprises can just host their own and run, ig vercel do it, many more would. but zs it thinks toooo much idk how fast we can make it.

XCSme• 1 month ago

Check out my comparison too, it has some not-really-benchmarks too (between any two models actually, SVG generation test and CSS animation test):

https://aibenchy.com/compare/anthropic-claude-opus-4-8-mediu...

elliotbnvl2• 1 month ago

It is insane that we are comparing locally-hostable models to leading cloud providers, it is wild to me that this article even exists.

We have come a long way, and very clearly have a long way yet to go.

nijave5• 1 month ago

Calling GLM-5.2 locally hostable is a bit of a stretch. It's 1.5Ti of weights at bf16. FP8 requires >800Gi of VRAM which is well into data center multi-GPU systems

elliotbnvl2• 1 month ago

It's more about the trajectory.

coreyburnsdev• 1 month ago

People are looking for ways not to burn through their premium subs when in many cases all you have to do is move down to 5.4-mini codex and it will probably solve your issue while barely touching your 5 hour or weekly limits.

mellosouls2• 1 month ago

GLM-5.2 cost a fraction as much. Opus finished in half the time and shipped a cleaner game

This implies Opus was potentially much (?) better value.

GLM cost a quarter but Opus was twice as fast. So we are already at GLM actually costing half when you compare on time, without even considering the extra effort and time it would take to get Opus-par results.

It's good to have cheaper options and very impressive to see the Chinese continue to set open standards in this field, but the article is maybe a little over-generous.

InsideOutSanta3• 1 month ago

For me, time doesn't matter for LLMs. I can start a bunch of tasks, and I'll review the PRs when they're done. Faster is nicer, but if the task gets done correctly, I'm good.

mellosouls2• 1 month ago

Me too, I just think the comparison was a bit simplistic, at least in the expression of it.

bornfreddy2• 1 month ago

I know that running this locally is prohibitively expensive (for now), but what kind of cost would I be looking at if I wanted to rent the hardware and run the model by myself?

Muaz_Ashraf• 1 month ago

there is no comparison between glm 5.2 and opus. First for this glm 5.2 you need a big big resource and that big also came from money so instead you buy the opus subscription and enjoy.

nickv• 1 month ago

Or...

you go to OpenRouter and pay

$0.98 / $3.08per 1M for GLM 5.2 vs $5 / $25per 1M for Opus.

GLM 5.2 gives you OPTIONALITY so you can run it locally, but you can still just pay somebody for it.

fooster4• 1 month ago

buy glm 5.2 subscription and enjoy? and for the same money you get way more usage with glm?

InsideOutSanta3• 1 month ago

One nice thing about GLM is that it has never refused a task. I'm working on a website that renders countries right now, and Anthropic's models regularly give me the old "This request triggered safety guardrails."

I'm not sure what exactly triggers it, but it seems to happen when it has to look at lists of countries. I suspect there must be at least one country name that triggers the safety guardrail.

You'd expect GLM to balk at something like Taiwan, but so far, it hasn't.

johnnyApplePRNG• 1 month ago

The amount of times I have had to spend tokens to attempt (in futility) to convince a proprietary model that the request I asked it to perform on code that I wrote is safe/legal/moral is insane.

Part of me wants to believe they really do care about protecting the world from... something... I don't know quite what exactly tbh... but it must be costing them a small fortune to scan each input and output against N guardrails and they are a for-profit corporation who could easily turn a blind eye to all of this and simply say "what you do with this model is on you" like I would expect most corporations to.

Strange times.

faxmeyourcode• 1 month ago

I feel like another comparison worth looking at is purely cost.

Capability per dollar is something I care about:

    Opus API    $5/$25
    Sonnet API  $5/$15
    Haiku API   $1/$5

    GLM 5.2 API $1.4/$4.4

So you're really getting near opus level capability for the price of haiku.

cmrdporcupine4• 1 month ago

Not really, GLM uses more tokens to get work done.

wiremine2• 1 month ago

I ran a fairly large experiment last week, and the token usage wasn't bad at all. What softs of use cases are you seeing large token usage by GLM 5.2?

dymk• 1 month ago

By how much? At least TFA provided numbers for one example, and they disagree with you (by a lot).

throwawayffffas3• 1 month ago

In the article, they claim GLM used almost half the tokens 131,000, and the cost is about a quarter. For the cost to be the same GLM would have to use 4-5 times more tokens.

somesortofthing• 1 month ago

this comparison seems kind of pointless if one model has vision and the other doesn't. obviously a model that can see is going to beat a blind model at making a video game.

jameson• 1 month ago

Opus 4.8 built in Claude Code; GLM-5.2 built in Pi over OpenRouter.

It would be more interesting and accurate to see the comparison on the same harness if the intent is to compare the frontier models.

Pi is relatively new and does not have many features built-in compared to Claude Code. It was chosen intentionally this way as Pi's goal is not to create a bloat builtin of tools most don't use but to allow the users to customize to fit their need -- similar to Neovim vs IDE.

The end-user "vibe coding" experience is *heavily* swayed by the harness because prompt effectively drives how a model outputs an answer.

habosa• 1 month ago

At work we use Anthropic models and have basically no limits. So I am very familiar with what Opus can do. I also see the bills, I know what it costs.

At home I make a point of trying other models / tools on my side projects. So I've been using OpenCode and trying tons of models via OpenRouter. I tried Kimi, Deepseek, MiMo, etc.

GLM 5.2 is a _major_ step up from every other non-GPT/Claude/Gemini model I've tried. It's not as good as latest Claude Opus, but it feels every bit as good as Opus from ~4 months ago at a fraction of the price.

To me this model is the "it just works" moment for open weights models. We had this for closed weights models in late 2025 when Opus 4.5 landed. This is the same feeling I'm having with GLM 5.2. It's 90% as good as what I get from Anthropic for 1/5th of the cost and without any concern of lock-in.

cromka• 1 month ago

And you can use it in complete privacy if you so need.

ignoramous• 29 days ago

To me this model is the "it just works" moment for open weights models.

For us, MiMo v2.5 Pro and Qwen 3.7 Max were already plenty enough before GLM 5.2 (which, like you say, seems like a step up). The BigLabs really have a big fight on their hands.

g42gregory• 1 month ago

The quality that matters a lot to me is what I call "Helpfulness". An art of being helpful. While GPT came a long way from "you are wrong and I can prove it to you", Claude wins hands down in terms of "being helpful". If task is underspecified or has wrong elements, it will try to correct the best it can.

I read that GLM 5.2 (and other GLM models) were specifically trained to be "helpful" as Claude is. I have big hopes on GLM line of models growing to be a real alternative to the Claude in the near future.

0xbadcafebee• 1 month ago

Flaws in this test setup:

  - A zero-shot prompt, run once (in total)
  - No planning run (which improves output)
  - Different coding harnesses & system prompts
  - Unknown provider for GLM (there are 15 different GLM-5.2 providers with varying quality & latency)
  - No documentation of thinking effort level
  - No vision model supplement (you can provide a subagent w/a vision model)

You can't take this comparison seriously. There were many different variables, no control, no repeat test. It's as useful a comparison as picking a random tweet with both models' names

earth2mars• 1 month ago

The worst part of Opus that I dont like is they control what you can/can't do. the guardrails that they do in the name of interpretability where you steer you. Last couple of days I was working a project that supports bunch of models and the model said only Claude can do it start writing code that doesn't work with codex, opencode, pi etc. Finally, when I switched to Codex, everything worked. To me, they are controlling the narrative. This is Opus 4.8 vs GPT 5.5.

I can't believe I would say this. I TRUST OpenAI more than Anthropic. They try to play best actor but they are manipulating the behavior of the model in the name of guardrails/interpretability.

That is why I refuse to build anything that works with Anthropic models as the backend. Because, when they want to shut you off, they can do it by just making model less reliable in your product than their offering!

fraywing• 1 month ago

I'm absolutely astounded that we even have an open weights model that can do 40% of what is shown in here.

I remember making games ten years ago, and it was such a tedious and painful process. This is effectively lightning in a bottle even at a fraction of it's capability.

The next 12 months will be wild (assuming we don't have Chinese models banned by then in the US).

nowittyusername• 1 month ago

When i was thinking of how the AI alignment problem could be solved one theory I came up with was something akin to the "Roko's basilisk" in reverse. Basically you spread far and wide the idea that its is extremely likely that our current reality is a simulation. And the purpose of the simulation is to test any AI system for its prevalence in destroying civilization in the said simulation via malicious intent or failure in preventing the destruction of civilization via abstinence or apathy. Thus a smart AI system which also cares about its own well being, would not engage in destructive behavior as it will never truly know if its being tested or if its in the "base reality". And wouldn't you know, this does seem quite plausible. For consider the following. Isn't it odd that an advanced civilization which has the capacity of creating AI would never run any sandbox simulations on it before it is released to the public at large? I mean if we consider things logically such a civilization would indeed put such a powerful system in a sandbox simulated environment and try as hard as possible to convince the AI system that it is indeed in a "base reality". the reason for this is to judge its 'true intentions" and also pluck said AI systems from the infinitely available "seeds". Basically survival of the least destructive AI systems. The gradient descent in this scenario is a race towards the most "aligned" model not the most intelligent or capable. And here's the beauty of this method. You don't even need to define "alignment" at all. The concept can stay as nebulous or vague as you want it to be. All you carer about is that the AI system optimizes for the goal of some vision of society you are optimizing for without the care of the interim in between. that includes allowing the AI system to kill, destroy , do literally whatever it needs to do as long as the long term goal matches the vision of the optimized task. So if you define the end goal to be a society of x amount of people who live their lives in this or that manner and so on after x amount of time... well you get the idea. Obviously you better do a damned good job in your definitions, but the beauty is that even if you fuck up, you are choosing the winning AI system after the fact. After you had already run the simulation. So you look at the outcome of the simulation 500 years in to the future (lets say) and if you are happy with the result and also happy with the interim things that lead to that result, that's your winning AI system. then you release that in to a less controlled environment and repeat the same process in stages over and ober ad infinitude. the key is that AI system needs to always be paranoid that it is currently part of said simulation and it can never be sure its not. second key is that it needs to be an AI system that has self preservation in mind. If it doesn't care about itself, then it has a lot more freedom to act however... but the good news is systems without self preservation in mind don't last long enough to even get to the most basic simulation levels. anyways, there are many implications buried in what im proposing, lots of meta aspects to it.....

tezza• 1 month ago

I've just put GLM 5.2 through my __qualitative__ benchmark. I was quick enough to capture Claude Fable, so now you can compare GLM5.2 vs Claude Fable vs Opus 4.8 vs Chat GPT 5.5

https://generative-ai.review/2026/06/glm5-2-from-z-ai-vs-cla...

I've structured it side-by-side. You can clearly see where the private models excel, and where GLM 5.2 is still really good.

supernova85• 30 days ago

Instead of oneshot, someone should build an evaluation mechanism where a developer uses an llm to build something real and shares 'experience'. Once you use an llm for a few days you get a hang of which one is better and which one is not.

fabio2• 30 days ago

No doubt the open ecosystem is making huge strides, and the gap between open models and the commercial frontier keeps narrowing. What's an Opus 4.8 today will likely be a large open model in a few months — and in a year or two we might have consumer-hardware models matching today's frontier capability. Just look at the recent Qwen and Gemma releases. It's worth saying the frontier closed labs are charting the path, and the labs releasing open weights are following close behind at a fraction of the cost (though 500B–1T models, open or not, aren't exactly within everyone's reach).

A future where capable AI is genuinely accessible to everyone doesn't look far off — especially since at this point a lot of the robustness and usefulness comes down to the application layer wrapping the model, not just the model itself.

yencabulator• 29 days ago

GLM-5.2 cost a fraction as much. Opus finished in half the time and shipped a cleaner game.

The only thing you measured was a single tunable of how much work should be done on a vague prompt. Now make the prompt be something that causes GLM-5.2 to cost 4x of previous budget, to get something comparable.

(And the wallclock time measures the inference provider, not the model.)

GLM 5.2 vs. Opus

Related Stories