Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Bought some API credits and ran it through opencode (model was "GLM 5").

Pretty impressed, it did good work. Good reasoning skills and tool use. Even in "unfamiliar" programming languages: I had it connect to my running MOO and refactor and rewrite some MOO (dynamic typed OO scripting language) verbs by MCP. It made basically no mistakes with the programming language despite it being my own bespoke language & runtime with syntactical and runtime additions of my own (lambdas, new types, for comprehensions, etc). It reasoned everything through by looking at the API surface and example code. No serious mistakes and tested its work and fixed as it went.

Its initial analysis phase found leftover/sloppy work that Codex/GPT 5.3 left behind in a session yesterday.

Cost me $1.50 USD in token credits to do it, but z.AI offers a coding plan which is absolutely worth it if this is the caliber of model they're offering.

I could absolutely see combining the z.AI coding plan with a $20 Codex plan such that you switch back and forth between GPT 5.3 and GLM 5 depending on task complexity or intricacy. GPT 5.3 would only be necessary for really nitty gritty analysis. And since you can use both in opencode, you could start a session by establishing context and analysis in Codex and then having GLM do the grunt work.

Thanks z.AI!

when i look at the prices these people are offering, and also the likes of kimi, and I wonder how are openAI, anthropic and google going to justify billions of dollars of investment? surely they have something in mind other than competing for subscriptions and against the abliterated open models that won't say "i cannot do that"

EDIT:

cheechw - point taken. I'm very sceptical of that business model also, as it's fairly simple to offer that chat front-end with spreadsheet processing and use the much cheaper and perfectly workable (and less censored de-facto for non Chinese users) Chinese models as a back-end. Maybe if somehow they manage to ban them effectively.

sorry, don't seem to be able to reply to you directly

They're all pretending to bring about the singularity (surely a 1 million token context window is enough, right?) and simultaneously begging the US government to help them create monopolies.

Meanwhile said government burns bridges with all its allies, declaring economic and cultural warfare on everybody outside their borders (and most of everyone inside, too). So nobody outside of the US is going to be rooting for them or getting onside with this strategy.

2026 is the year where we get pragmatic about these things. I use them to help me code. They can make my team extremely effective. But they can't replace them. The tooling needs improvement. Dario and SamA can f'off with their pronouncements about putting us all out of work and bringing about ... god knows what.

The future belongs to the model providers who can make it cost effective and the tool makers who augment us instead of trying ineptly to replace us with their bloated buggy over-engineered glorified chat loop with shell access.

Yeah that's a good idea. I played around with kimi2.5/gemini in a similar way and it's solid for the price. It would be pretty easy to build some skills out and delegate heavy lifting to better models without managing it yourself I think. This has all been driven by anthropic's shenanigans (I cancelled my max sub after almost a year both because of the opencode thing and them consistently nerfing everything for weeks to keep up the arms race.)

Yeah I did the same (cancel Anthropic). Mainly because the buggy/bloatiness of their tooling pissed me off and I got annoyed by Dario's public pronouncements (not that SamA is any better).

I ended up impressed enough w/ GPT 5.3 that I did the $200 for this month, but only because I can probably write-off as business expense in next year's accounting.

Next month I'll probably do what I just said: $20 each to OpenAI and Google for GPT 5.3 and Gemini 3 [only because it gets me drive and photo storage], buy the z.AI plan, and only use GPT for nitty gritty analysis heavy work and review and GLM for everything else.

Cancelled my Anthropic subscription this week after about 18 months of membership. Usage limits have dropped drastically (or token usage have increased) to the point where it's unusable.

Codex + Z.ai combined is the same price, has far higher usage limits and just as good.

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