A user shares positive impressions of the GLM-5.2 model, noting its impressive performance and cost-efficiency compared to Deepseek, and reflects on the educational value and limitations of AI agents for coding and learning.
I've been using the GLM-5.2 for about five days now, and my feeling is simple: it's impressive. Really impressive. It felt much stronger than I expected, and the hallucination rate felt surprisingly low. GLM-5.2 has 753B parameters, but in my own use it feels stronger than Opus, which Musk said was around 5T. I know parameter count is not everything, but this still feels a bit crazy to me. And I have another take: GLM feels cheaper than Deepseek in real use. Yeah, GLM costs more per token. But when I actually use it in Claude Code, I usually set GLM effort to high, while Deepseek needs ultra. GLM also uses fewer tokens and gives me better results. So for solving one actual problem, GLM can end up cheaper. That is what I care about. Another thing I feel strongly after these few days is that agents are really good teachers. I can watch how they think and how they solve problems from beginning to end. That matters a lot to me. Even if someone teaches me step by step, I still usually can't see how they are thinking. And because I am pretty introverted, I don't like bothering people with too many questions. So I often just half-understand things and move on. With an agent, I don't have that problem. I can ask whatever I want, ask very basic questions, and get the structure of a new thing very quickly. The downside is obvious too: maybe I will get worse at finding knowledge by myself. But honestly, if it helps me get started fast, I think that tradeoff is worth it most of the time. Agents are not magic though. They often think too much. They waste time and tokens on details I don't always need. For coding, I like that. For other practical tasks, it can be annoying. So I mostly let agents write code, because that is where they are strongest. For interactive tasks, I let the agent do it once, learn from it, review it, and then try to do it myself. I still don't fully trust AI hallucinations. Humans hallucinate too, but AI hallucinations feel more random. In areas I know well, I trust my own judgment more. So review is still necessary. I also can't push responsibility onto AI. If a project goes wrong, I can't say, “The AI did it, go ask the AI.” The result is still mine. I also don't think AI has real outstanding creativity. Everything it gives is still a prediction. It is great at the how, but the why still has to come from humans. Even with all these problems, I still think agents are a big deal. They really make knowledge easier to access. That is why I want to work on agent development.
A detailed user review of GLM-5.2 accessed via API, praising its long-context coherence, adaptive reasoning, and frontier-level text performance comparable to GPT-5.5, while noting the lack of native vision and high local compute requirements.
GLM-5.2, a 753B parameter open-source model with MIT license, offers frontier-level coding capabilities and massive context window. Its distillation potential promises significant improvements for local AI setups.
Z.ai released GLM-5.2, an open-weight AI model that represents a step change for open agents, with strong benchmark performance and community hype, positioning it as the only open model competing with top closed models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The author praises GLM-5.2, an MIT open-weights model, for its exceptional real-world performance in human evaluation benchmarks, claiming it rivals the best closed-source models like those from Claude.