For short-term bugfixing and tweaks though, it does about what I'd expect from Sonnet for a pretty low price.
Since the entire purpose, focus and motivation of this model seems to have been "coherency over longer contexts", doesn't that issue makes it not an OK model? It's bad at the thing it's supposed to be good at, no?
It does devolve into gibberish at long context (~120k+ tokens by my estimation but I haven't properly measured), but this is still by far the best bang-for-buck value model I have used for coding.
It's a fine model
I'm curious how the bang for buck ratio works in comparison. My initial tests for coding tasks have been positive and I can run it at home. Bigger models I assume are still better on harder tasks.
So I need them to not only not devolve into gibberish, but remain smart enough to be useful at contexts several times longer than that.
I suspect that this isn't the model, but something that z.ai is doing with hosting it. At launch I was related to find glm-5.1 was stable even as the context window filled all the way up (~200k). Where-as glm-5, while it could still talk and think, but had forgotten the finer points of tool use to the point where it was making grevious errors as it went (burning gobs of tokens to fix duplicate code problems).
However, real brutal changes happened sometimes in the last two or three months: the parent problem emerged and emerged hard, out of nowhere. Worse, for me, it seemed to be around 60k context windows, which was heinous: I was honestly a bit despondent that my z.ai subscription had become so effectively useless. That I could only work on small problems.
Thankfully the coherency barrier raised signficiantly around three weeks go. It now seems to lose its mind and emits chaotic non-sentance gibberish around 100k for me. GLM-5 was already getting pretty shaky at this point, so I feel like I at least have some kind of parity. But at least glm-5 was speaking & thinking with real sentances, I could keep conversing with it somewhat, where-as glm-5.1 seems to go from perfectly level headed working fine to all of a sudden just total breakdown, hard switch, at such a predictable context window size.
It seems so so probable to me that this isn't the model that's making this happen: it's the hosting. There's some KV cache issue, or they are trying to expand the context window in some way, or to switch from one serving pool of small context to a big context serving pool, or something infrastructure wise that falls flat and collapses. Seeing the window so clearly change from 200k to 60k to 100k is both hope, but also, misery.
I've been leaving some breadcrumbs on Bluesky as I go. It's been brutal to see. Especially having tasted a working glm-5.1. I don't super want to pay API rates to someone else, but I fully expect this situation to not reproduce on other hosting, and may well spend the money to try and see. https://bsky.app/profile/jauntywk.bsky.social/post/3mhxep7ek...
All such a shame because aside from totally going mad & speaking unpuncutaed gibberish, glm-5.1 is clearly very very good and I trust it enormously.
https://github.com/Opencode-DCP/opencode-dynamic-context-pru...
During off peak hour a simple 3 line CSS change took over 50 minutes and it routinely times out mid-tool and leaves dangling XML and tool uses everywhere, overwriting files badly or patching duplicate lines into files
But it's all casual side projects.
Edit: I often to /compact at around 100 000 token or switch to a new session. Maybe that is why.
Devil's advocate: why shouldn't they do it if OpenAI, Anthropic and Google get away with playing this game?
dang•1h ago
[[you guys, please don't post like this to HN - it will just irritate the community and get you flamed]]
smith7018•1h ago
Interesting.
Hopefully these aren't bots created by Z.AI because GLM doesn't need fake engagement.
dang•1h ago
Thanks for watching out for the quality of HN...
ray__•20m ago
tadfisher•53m ago
There are YC members in the current batch who are spamming us right now [2]. They are all obvious engagement-bait questions which are conveniently answered with references to the SaaS.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DoneDirtCheap/comments/1n5gubz/get_...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AIJobs/comments/1oxjfjs/hiring_paid...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/1sdyijs/no_code...
greenavocado•48m ago