Some people seem to agree and some don't, but I think that indicates we're just down to your specific domain and usage patterns rather than the SOTA models being objectively better like they clearly used to be.
You are right that this is not exactly subjectivity, but I think for most people it feels like it. We don't have good benchmarks (imo), we read a lot about other people's experiences, and we have our own. I think certain models are going to be objectively better at certain tasks, it's just our ability to know which currently is impaired.
The best tests are your own custom personal-task-relevant standardized tests (which the best models can't saturate, so aiming for less than 70% pass rate in the best case).
All this is to say that most people are not doing the latter and their vibes are heavily confounded to the point of being mostly meaningless.
People judge models on their outputs, but how you like to prompt has a tremendous impact on those outputs and explains why people have wildly different experiences with the same model.
One model can replace another at any given moment in time.
It's NOT a winner-takes-all industry
and hence none of the lofty valuations make sense.
the AI bubble burst will be epic and make us all poorer. Yay
But more seriously, I can't help but be amused by how emotionally invested in their AI brand of choice people are getting.
GLM 5.1 is pretty good but there are some "buts".
They hiked the prices 2 times this year. I subscribed to the pro coding plan just before the last hike. At the start of the year, they had only 5 hours quota and no weekly quota. And I hit the weekly quota hard. I can't upgrade the subscription to get a higher weekly quota because they jacked up the prices a lot recently.
My $30 subscription costs now $72. Previously was $15. Max was $49,then $80 and now $160.
If this was the case then Anthropic would be in a very bad spot.
It's not, which is why people got so mad about being forced to use it rather than better third party harnesses.
Pi is better than CC as a harness in almost every respect.
- It still lacks support for industry standards such as AGENTS.md
- Extremely limited customization
- Lots of bugs including often making it impossible to view pre-compaction messages inside Claude Code.
- Obvious one: can't easily switch between Claude and non-Claude models
- Resource usage
More than anything, I haven't found a single thing that Pi does worse. All of it is just straight up better or the same.
But I agree it's close enough that it's worth using heavily. I've not cancelled my Claude Max subscription, but I've added a z.ai subscription...
opencode is awesome I don't miss cluade or codex cli at all, and the z.ai plan is way more generous in compression.
I was lucky to subscribe to z.ai coding plan pro when it costed 30$/month, I was surprised now it costs 70$/month.
In case anyone wants to subscribe to z.ai with 10% discount [1] * here is the credit campaign rules * [2]
Will try it out. Thanks for sharing!