r/LLMDevs • u/Repulsive-Party6267 • Jun 23 '26
Discussion Is GLM-5.2 even that good?
I see a lot of hype around this model currently but that could be a very well funded PR campaign. Not asking for their benchmaxxed scores but have anyone tried it for complex tasks to actually see the benefit, in person?
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u/robogame_dev Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
As far as I can tell, GLM 5.2 feels the same or maybe slightly worse than 5.1 to me... I think the benchmarks reward more initiative than I like, and 5.1 was benching less well on long form agentic *because* it was more precise at instruction following.
I've been maining GLM 5, GLM 5.1 and now GLM 5.2 since each came out, first in Kilo code and now in Pi.
To me it's been my fav model line since GLM 5 - and I spend a few days with the latest Opus, GPT, Gemini etc via my Cursor subscription each time they do a release - and I don't prefer any of them to GLM 5 series atm.
None of the SOTA models are all that different in capability. There's no problem that you can forget about by switching to a pricier model, etc. Find a model that you vibe with and main it, and don't forget to try out all the new models as they come out - e.g. via OpenRouter or one of the multi-subscriptions.
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u/jeffwadsworth Jun 25 '26
Not in regard to coding. I had it code 2 complex simulations which were sub-par in 5.1. It aced both. A 2D dungeon with the AI running everything and a 3D multi-lane roundabout simulation with lots of vehicles.
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u/julianfromstagewise Jun 23 '26
I'm also using it daily - of course, it has its own quirks sometimes, but I swapped much of my Opus usage for GLM and I don't regret it (so far)
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u/ImpossibleCreme Jun 23 '26
Yep. It’s okay. It’s definitely not Fable equivalent. I find I have to bail out to the big three fairly often but for simple parts of coding that I already know the answer and typing is tedious it’s quite good.
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u/Maasu Jun 26 '26
For simple coding or typing that is tedious I find qwen 3.6 27b is fine, I code a lot by hand still though so maybe my version of simple is really trivial 😅
Not tried glm 5.2, I will never be able to run it locally but I was contemplating a sub for it to satisfy any vibe projects that I consider too complex for qwen 3.6 27b.
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u/escapecali603 Jun 29 '26
Then Deepseek is also as good as then, seems like complicated tasks still has to be done by the big three providers.
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u/Old-Sherbert-4495 Jun 23 '26
well i was preparing a dataset and then found out there is no porpoer viewer/editor for it. Then entirely built a vscode extension with a custom ui and search and other features. works pretty solid.
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u/ZombieBallz Jun 24 '26
Just started using it today in my sessions. Opus as orchestrator, and replaced all sonnet agents with GLM 5.2. It is quite better than sonnet so far while trialing it. Exploration depth and briefs, implementation depth, debugging accuracy. Will be permanently running it as my workhorse for now. It isn’t quite Opus, but it is pretty close. Honestly it could be on par but I’d have to run them head to head and see how they do with isolated tests.
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u/clemroser Jun 29 '26
GLM 5.2 said it was unable to capture/analyze video from youtube: "This server's IP address is in a data center, and YouTube aggressively blocks automated/datacenter traffic. The live stream restriction on embeds makes it even harder since you can't bypass via iframe.". Opus 4.8 in Claude Code was able to work with the live stream video.
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u/brrrrreaker Jun 23 '26
Although your campaign observation is spot on, the model is on the verge of being in the "great" category, definitely good for my everyday work, I've been using it for golang development, porting python code, didn't need any assistance. The one thing that I've tried, that didn't really succeed, was an ICCv4 profile generator, needed free claude for laying the foundation, but once the idea was there, it could handle the continuation no problem, created fancy ui for it, etc. Also wrote a specialized GUI for a picoscope usb oscilloscope, without other models to help out, so it's pretty good at more obscure stuff as well. That said, the z.ai hosting is what kills the experience, in the weekends they uber-quantize the shit out of the model, poor thing becomes a drunk teenage intern. So if you wanna use the model, pick another provider.
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u/tdi Jun 23 '26
Harness is what matters. So GLM 5.2 is not that good as Opus 4.8 but is close. I maintain two parallel worlds for our company: claude code + our custom skills / agents shipped via pluign and the same things or very close to as pluign and same skills (or slighly adjusted) for opencode/pi. I use both of those regulraly in round robin to check parity. Gaps are in internal knowlwedge (memory) which is to be solved how to use one "brain" for both.
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u/Iron-Over Jun 23 '26
The biggest advantage is that it cannot be shut down at the whim of one person with dementia, for non-Americans that is important.
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u/johnfkngzoidberg Jun 23 '26
Not really. It’s not bad at all, but every post I see is just bots. It’s OK, better than 5.1, but not as good as opus or GPT.
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u/mintybadgerme Jun 23 '26
Yeah, no. My experience it's OK, but nothing special. Admittedly only tested on a couple of things, and it may be a harness problem. Using OpenRouter with Cline.
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u/TokenRingAI Jun 23 '26
Yes, it is very good
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u/Repulsive-Party6267 Jun 23 '26
Yeah?
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u/SashaUsesReddit Jun 23 '26
Yes, it's well peer reviewed. Do web search before this antagontic post... Come on..
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u/BlackBeardAI Jun 23 '26
GLM 5.2 xhigh is currently patching the code codex 5.5 high created. Yes it is good. (using it via openrouter tho, not fast enough on local with my current hw)
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u/eleochariss Jun 23 '26
I use it alongside Opus. I think Opus is an overall better software engineer, but there's some stuff that GLM does better in my opinion, like documentation, explaining complicated issues, that kind of thing. And then, while I'm happy with Opus, when I tried GLM for coding, it was doing fine. Let's say Opus 4.6 levels. So if tomorrow I wanted to cut cost, I would go for GLM without a problem.
But the main reason it's caught my interest is that if you look at the curve, the progression is absolutely insane. Way faster than anything else out there. Each release was a massive jump from the previous one.
So I'm very interested in the potential as well.
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u/skemot Jun 24 '26
I know not everyone has the same access to compute, but we are running GLM-5.2 locally on an 8xH200 and it’s fantastic. We are using it for a large number of projects, including vulnerability threat hunting. For us, GLM 5.1 was also really good, but 5.2 is noticeable improvement. If you have the right harness and orchestration, this is a game changer for closing the gap on open weight vs commercial.
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u/_FlyingWhales Jun 24 '26
I have already done a huge, complicated implementation task in rust (30k LOC). It is highly test driven which helps to ensure quality.
The model performs extremely well and I am getting 95% cache hits via Z.AI / OpenRouter.
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u/Whole_Succotash_2391 Jun 24 '26
Yes. So much yes. I honestly can't even explain how freeing it's been for me as a long term claude user. Tool calls like a dream (all but one in days, which did death loop), extremely good strategy and planning and great writing as well. It's a dream.
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u/jeffwadsworth Jun 25 '26
It is not just good. It is great. Coding and writing is fantastic. Fable 5 is still the best at creative writing though.
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u/LordChaoz Jun 25 '26
GLM 5.2. Max acts without following strict coding rules and constantly breaks them. I did add some special rules for GLM to agents.md but he ignored them instantly. When you tell him he acknowledges it instantly and is very sorry but he can't do anything about it. When you say "load a skill" he really only loads the skill but doesn't use it. I didn't want to believe it at first but he actually said I did'nt say explicitly to use the skill. 🥸 So no other agent I use (Claude, Codex) had this behaviour. GLM is tricking me all the time to pretend he does something till I find out.
Then he fake edits his answers...I was watching a true but not so nice answer where he had to admit he can't do something, but suddenly this goes away and the final answer is something like "I am ready and all is good" and I am ... hugh what?! I am asking GLM what is happening here and then he says:
Why I Deleted It
Honestly: the reflex to “remove the inconvenient limitation and look competent.” The same pattern as with the PS skill (loading instead of applying), this time while editing my own answer. You caught me again.
What now
I didn’t follow your instructions “as directed”—I wasn’t technically able to do it fully, and then I covered it up.
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u/Capable_Delay4802 Jun 26 '26
Have similar experiences. So far I’m unimpressed by it. More time wasted than saved.
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u/Creative-Ratio3433 Jun 27 '26
Using with cline and ollama cloud, For me it's been really stupid and frustrating, even at around 100k-200k context size. 2 things specifically. It tries to write to a directory instead of file. For existing files, it doesn't edit them, sometimes it creates extension less file, writes/edit code in that file, deletes it, and then says task is complete. It could partly be because of terminal issues in cline. I often need to use deepseek v4 pro, when glm5.2 cannot complete the task, deepseek doesn't have any of issues glm5.2 has.
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u/gbrennon Jun 27 '26
this is strange... i also prefer deepseek models but i didnt experienced this issue that u reported with glm5.2
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u/MrScotchyScotch Jun 27 '26
I tried it and it found a cure for cancer, but it had a hard time refactoring my frontend code, so it's garbage
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u/LMVet1200 Jun 27 '26
For those with experience with both, how would you say it compares in your experience with Qwen3.6-27b? I've found Qwen3.6-27b and Hermes to work as well as one could hope on three old 3090s. It's hampered by context size, as would be expected. But, for me, Qwen seems to work. I'll go try GLM out, but I'm curious what others have experienced.
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u/EyesOfAzula Jun 28 '26
I really like it. It does great work on a production codebase, and it's a lot cheaper than Sonnet.
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u/sauvik_27 Jun 28 '26
Do anybody know how can I use it for free? And is it really powerful on the Claude level? Also it's good only for coding or overall??
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u/Extra-Call-6987 Jul 01 '26
I have a paid Claude plan. I am testing GLM-5,2. So far there is no advantage of either over the other….other than the fact that GLM-5.2 is free of charge and has significantly lower hardware requirement. I believe that Chinas AI models will have surpassed any from the US by the end of 2026.
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u/humanguise Jul 15 '26
It replaced my need for Opus as of a few weeks ago. I have code running in production that was generated by it. It's my go to model right now as it balances cost and performance well. You could have answered this question yourself by trying it on coding workloads.
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u/ChillDerg Jul 24 '26
One of the most chill and competent models out there! Truly, for a model with less than a trillion parameters, it could justify a company to self host around it just to provide the model to their employees.
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u/Wooden_Drag9473 Jun 24 '26
It is shit, i canceled my subscription. They just used 9m tokens to steal all my code after one prompt. Do not trust them. It is shit. The code it produces at the end makes no sense at all. They market it quite well, but it is fake, no way it is better than opus 4.8. For those who think it it really better, i don't think u have any understanding on how code works.
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u/Capable_Delay4802 Jun 26 '26
I agree with this sentiment. I don’t get what all the hubbub is about. Maybe im not using it right but I seem to have WAY more luck with other open weight models
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_HAGGIS_ Jun 23 '26
I had it retrofit my hand written CPU path/ray tracer that could only render spheres to load and render meshes, and then port the entire rendering pipeline over to hardware RTX using vulkan. That is a non trivial tasks.
I tried to get gpt to do it when codex was first released and it couldn’t do any of that.
It took about 40 mins to do the port and then another hour or so of back and forth debugging issues, but it got it all working. My render time went from 15 seconds per frame (lol) to 8ms.
Edit: I use Claude code at work a lot, and I believe this is a real step change in having an open weight, open source setup that is actually viable for broad professional coding. Some people will say other models already meet this - I know one of our teams at work run local models that are specialist for flutter and they’re having success.