I ran GLM 5.2 with OpenCode harness against Claude Opus this week deployed locally.
Bottom line: It is a real frontier coding model and insanely good for the price (free). Open source model + open source harness + local serving on my own chips is an amazing value proposition.
Some Notes:
1. Tool calling is very good — spun up nested subagents on its own, multiple levels deep
2. Very good at research and planning including long range plans
3. It built a cell based terminal renderer at near Opus quality. I still lean Claude, but most people couldn't tell the outputs apart
4. Opus wins on oneshotting and reading my intent without me explicitly telling it
5. GLM 5.2 is more than enough intelligence for most F500 work IMO
6. GLM 5.2 is good enough to hill climb RL with and to drive further AI development / next generation GLM model. Progress will be much faster for their RL from here.
7. Running my own endpoint = permanent fast mode
8. It wastes thinking tokens writing code in the reasoning block
At this point I would consider GLM 5.2 a true frontier coding model. Getting to this point in coding quality was the hardest part IMO. They will progress quickly from here in RL.
i don't really write code anymore. i just write "write code that does these 10 things in this order in these places" and then "actually can you change thing 7 to B instead of A" and then "ok now run a smoke test"