What are you running that model on?
StepFun 3.5 Flash is better compared to google's gemini 3 flash which is surprisingly good and pretty costly, and to GLM-5.
I find this outcome ironic given minimax's more aggressive marketing and large-scale distillation accusations from Anthropic specifically accusing minimax but not StepFun.
I can only wonder about the true underlying reasons, but deducing from public information I suspect that minimax simply has weaker, benchmaxx-targeting post-training R&D and leans more on distillation of western frontier models, while StepFun has extensive post-training with lots of hard-won custom R&D and internal large-scale distillation teachers.
I tried it out a bunch and it seems good. I can't really tell if it's better or worse than most of these other models in such a short time though.
Where GLM 5 is strictly worse for me though, compared to StepFun, is long-form content generation (planning, research documents) - but this can be said about geminis too and these are obviously very smart models.
Given the free option I'd explore GLM 5 more, but if I had to pay for it myself ofc I'd choose stepfun every time. Basically I think right now the optimal configuration for maximizing output of correct software features per dollar involves using StepFun or its future class competitor for bulk coding and first stage code review.
Maybe I need to write a blogpost about it after all.
What's really surprising to me is the cost of the model. It's definitely very good for its price. DeepSeek is the only one that offers and competition to it at that price point (GLM 5 is literally 10x more expensive).