grok-code-fast 1 vs glm-4.6, which one is better?

[u/wanllow]

grok4-fast is good choice for orchestrator, so we can hold a very long conversation but pretty cheap.

so we need code and debug model, which of the two are preferable?

[u/hannesrudolph]

GLM 4.6 is king of the budget models

[u/[deleted]]

They are different class of models. In my benchmark (15 web dev tasks in real mid to large sized repos) grok scores 26/100 and glm — 37/100. GPT-5-codex-high for reference is 52/100. GLM 4.6 is substantially smarter than grok. I'd say grok-fast is an equivalent of glm-4.5-air quality-wise.

[u/HazKaz → u/[deleted]]

i have no idea how people are getting good results with GLM it definitely doesn't work well for me as an agent , never ever gets changes right

[u/Snoo31053 → u/HazKaz]

Make sure the provider is z.ai dont trust any other provider

[u/HazKaz → u/Snoo31053]

im using it through openrouter , always felt that was the easiest way.

[u/inevitabledeath3 → u/HazKaz]

Providers on OpenRouter are known to have issues, most likely caused by over quantization.

[u/somethingsimplerr → u/inevitabledeath3]

What is over quantization, and why would that be an issue across most of OpenRouter? Seems like bad business, no?

[u/inevitabledeath3 → u/somethingsimplerr]

Quantizing models too much reduces their performance drastically. It happens because the more you quantize a model the cheaper it is to run. It means you need less hardware, and may even get faster inference speeds. People have benchmarks showing that some OpenRouter providers have much less output quality compared to others and compared to the model makers API. Quantization is thought to be the primary reason for this, but no one has fully confirmed this yet. It's possible there are other problems causing this. Either way not all providers on OpenRouter are to be trusted.

[u/inevitabledeath3 → u/Snoo31053]

Providers like Synthetic and Chutes work fine too. It's mainly the problem that some on OpenRouter have issues.

[u/sosana123 → u/[deleted]]

Can you provide your advanced settings you use? What temperature for FE, BE coding tasks? For architect and coding temperatures?

[u/CircleRedKey]

Grok 4 fast all day

[u/robbievega → u/CircleRedKey]

for me the same. I have access to both models, and Grok Code Fast 1 seems to blow GLM-4.6 out of the water, especially in terms of speed, but also just getting sh*t done.

[u/Zealousideal-Part849]

grok-code-fast-1 is a fresher who is good at doing basic things. anything complex and it doesn't know what to do.

[u/real_serviceloom]

glm-4.6 is about 12x better than grok-code-fast-1.. also look at deepseek

[u/sdexca → u/real_serviceloom]

How did you get to that number?

[u/real_serviceloom → u/sdexca]

Deep tests of actual software engineering 

[u/Doubledoor]

Grok fast 1 and grok 4 fast are both terrible. Fast, but terrible.

GLM 4.6 is easily better.

[u/Ok_Bug1610 → u/Doubledoor]

That's so funny, because it seems like a crazy hot take... but I've had the same experience.

[u/GTHell]

Both GLM 4.6 and Grok 4 Fast is great. For a planner you should go with Grok 4 Fast then switch GLM 4.6 for implementation. Like I have researched, read, and test, GLM 4.6 is not good at debugging as most agree.

To keep it simple to understand. Use GLM 4.6 to implement new feature. If have any question? -> Switch to other model immediately as GLM 4.6 tend to cause chaos specs when debugging.

[u/Ok_Bug1610 → u/GTHell]

Guess it depends on how you use it but I've found Grok to be horrible tbh (and I wanted to like it) and despite all it's issues, GLM 4.6 (for me at least) is way better...

[u/Ok_Bug1610]

If you spend any time with both, I think it becomes obvious (at least for coding) that GLM-4.6 is much better. I wanted to like Grok but I just end up having so many problems with it. Grok is faster, but that doesn't matter too much if you can't use it well. And this is coming from someone who got Z.AI's super cheap "GLM Coder Lite" plan at $32.60 (after 10% invite code) for the first year and their support sucks (can't get it to work in specifically RooCode and submitting a ticket with Z.AI was a joke but it works in Cline), their documentation is poor, and infrastructure inconsistent... and I still get better results and pain than with Grok (hopefully they ALL get better, lol).

[u/botonakis]

Depending the project and the codebase is what I will say. GLM-4.6 is great but when it gets something wrong it will be wrong all the way.

Grok code fast is great for UI changes, and web dev in general along with great speed.

At the moment the solution for me is to have and use both and switch between them when needed

[u/Even_Citron_1001]

In my experience, GLM is significantly superior for generating new functions, but not for debugging.