GLM-5.2 is a step change for open agents

I signed up to a z.ai max account, $144. Hardly been able to use it as it 429s on most requests. They’re also refusing to refund me.

Open weight models from Chinese labs tend to be significantly cheaper.

I think theyre absolutely needed. I can't afford 200 USD a month for personal use of coding AI, and I don't think such prices are reasonable for most of the world economy anyway. Not to mention US firms might be giving their employees a lot more than that.

It's increasingly feeling, to me, that theres a gap building up between haves and have nots. But then, we get news of these open weight models that are reasonably priced in inference with reasonable capabilities. Yes, they take maybe 6-9 months to get there, tbh, that's not a bad trade off at all.

Can people share their GLM and open model setups in general please? What provider do you use. Why do you trust it with serving full quality? What harness do you use? Why do you trust it not to have malware (most harnessed are TS apps). I am just trying GLM 5.1 from Nvidia build in open code would love to hear how you all do it, thanks.

I just tested GLM 5.2 out via Z.ai in pi for a little one-off project that was already scoped. It actually did a relatively decent job starting out, and figured important things out from context.

But the reasoning traces became increasingly hilarious, with it getting confused and going in loops, doubting itself. I began to feel almost sad, it was like listening to the internal monologue of someone with anxiety disorder.

It made pretty good progress but wound up going in a lot of goofy loops and doing things a bit "off" from standards I'd hoped it would infer, and finally started going a bit nuts, "This is very confusing.", "OH WAIT", seemingly hallucinating a whole side-quest that didn't make sense and looking at making internal system changes to try to achieve its (now very confused) goal when I pulled the plug.

Without seeing the reasoning traces from Claude/GPT it's hard to really know, but it definitely didn't feel like the same quality of reasoning, even if dogged persistence does wind up actually working eventually.

Ive been using glm5 since its release and still prefer it to glm5.1 and so far to glm5.2

Perhaps it is just my harness and workflow, but the older model still seems to work better. Also the token cost is significantly lower. I rarely spend more than $20 a week with $50 cap. Not even half claudes ambiguous minimum $200 a month plan.

I can't help wondering what kind of models we'll see coming out of China once it gets its own chip fabs up and running. Right now it sounds like the US's export ban is not slowing them down a whole lot.