GLM 5.2 vs. Opus(techstackups.com)
505 points by ritzaco 1 day ago | 329 comments
tl;dr: In a head-to-head test building a 3D platformer in raw WebGL from a single prompt, Claude Opus 4.8 finished in half the time and shipped a cleaner, more correct game, while open-weights GLM-5.2 took longer and produced visible bugs (missing textures, broken win condition) but cost about a fifth as much. A key disadvantage: GLM-5.2 is text-only, so it couldn't visually verify its own output and shipped obvious rendering issues. Verdict: GLM-5.2 is the strongest open-weights model available and worth keeping around for cost/openness reasons, but Opus still wins on polish and correctness.
HN Discussion:
  • One-shot prompts are not a meaningful benchmark for real-world coding tasks
  • GLM 5.2 is impressive among open-weights models but still falls short of Opus for collaborative work
  • Cost-per-capability ratio makes GLM 5.2 highly attractive despite quality gap
  • The comparison is unfair due to different harnesses (Claude Code vs Pi) being used
  • ~GLM's text-only limitation could be mitigated by pairing with a multimodal model for vision tasks