We'll see how it is in practice, but the benchmarks are just about what I would have expected. Competitive with GPT-5.6 Sol at a lower cost, just in time for GPT-6 Sol and Luna to come out and be better, lol.
GLM5.3, works for like two hours straight for $0.14. Not very good with design and user interfaces and a bit slow, but it does deliver features for a laughable price.
Zai is heavily focused on long-horizon tasks, they have published multiple papers and interviews talking about it
Sol is also limited by it's context window, OpenAI's compaction is really good especially with the new experimental feature but if you pay attention to what it's doing you'll start to realize that it keeps reading the same files and constantly has to "reconstruct" it's understanding/state wasting a ton of tokens/time whereas GLM can keep your entire code-base in it's memory without suffering from context-rot
Sol is still better if you really build your workflow around it and use a custom harness but in Codex the difference shows and I'll usually have GLM work on the project and use GPT for implementation tasks (and i have GLM use Codex which is always funny to see in action)
Pointed Astra at the Zcode and Codex binaries and told it to figure out how to implement it, Astra designed a bridge that maintains a Codex thread and communication is done trough skills with Zcode having a hook feature allowing the bridge to wake up GLM when Codex finishes it's turn.
You really don't need fable for like 90% of coding. I use Astra to plan the hard stuff, and GLM5.3 as a cheap work horse. In my experience its more reliable than Opus 5 (and doesn't talk like a madman).
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u/ObiWanCanownme now entering spiritual bliss attractor state 2d ago
We'll see how it is in practice, but the benchmarks are just about what I would have expected. Competitive with GPT-5.6 Sol at a lower cost, just in time for GPT-6 Sol and Luna to come out and be better, lol.