At this point, I would like to consider other options, but if I want to get work done, opus 5.5. Hell even sonnet 5.5 is better than anything OpenAI has to offer when it comes to coding.
GLM flash catches Claude errors and bad assumptions, all LLMs make mistakes
I love local models, and I run 3.8 Flash Next on a dedicated machine. Alone with a number of image and video generation models. But if I'm doing REAL work, that isnt tinkering for fun on a side project, im using claude, because Qwen3.8 just cant handle large context project well without going off into left field.
Im SUPER jazzed for qwen4 with 1mil token context native support. I HOPE it a step up from 3.8 flash next. Ill be playing with all the qwen4 models the moment I can, but I dont see how someone working on large code bases doing REAL enterprise grade work is seriously using any local models in any capacity that comes remotely close to Opus 5.5+Claude
Sorry, but this is either dilettante talk or an unhinged exaggeration - Qwen, DS, GLM and MM are perfectly fine for REAL work, unless you are an overly ambitious vibe coder, but then no model can save you. The Cl hand-holding may feel like something but it won't lead to the completion of real REAL work.
I suspect that's because they're working on projects that are several orders of magnitude more complex and demanding than a "todo app".
The same way people have opinions on things like for example wines without actually being able to discern them in a blind test.
We humans want to think we can have strong, well founded opinions even when we cannot.
Their point may also be (re: wine), that some devs have been conditioned to think a certain token vendor (vineyard) is of superb quality, while if given a blind test (tasting) of the agents on a real world task, they would not notice the difference.
For those of us who use open weights, the difference has narrowed dramatically this year. I've personally been mostly eyes-free developing an NES harness with mostly flash models, bringing in Kimi from time to time, and stepped in a couple times to reframe the approach or architecture. For those of us who (when we) stay in the loop, the difference is near-zero because the tasks we give them are more bite sized.
The difference I have observed is most closely tied to the complexity or context requirements. While I work in a multi-million LoC codebase without any issue for open weights or flash models, my NES project is only 20k lines. The challenging part is the core loop (which needs to blend the emulator FPS with the agent loop) and game state observation (needs to detect byte changes in emulator RAM). The ROM decoding itself has not been so bad, I have actually been quite impressed with the little open weight models on this front. After it extracted the maps, then pulled out even more details, it has written an A* implementation that requires moving between different modes of transportation. (Final Fantasy 1)
Yes, this was the core of my point.
there is a huge difference between open models/other models/opus5.5 performance on, say, enterprise CRUD vs one shotting games vs embedded development vs pure algorithmic complex stuff vs cybersecurity stuff.
In my case "real work" is enterprise programming, while side projects are gaming stuff, so I'm better served by chinese open models on real work and opus for non-real work.
In my experience GLM5.3-4 are perfectly en par with opus 5.5 on pure enterprise CRUDs (basically 95% of enterprise programming) while GLM seriously lacks on game development.
the other aspect of real work is cybersecurity to me, and Opus5.5 and other models are very limited by their own safety, I have digital twins of our infra and I want LLMs to actually write full exploits on it, opus and openai just refuse to do it, GLM more than once got it there and showed me how it chained everything to actually break in the system and I could go around and fix stuff at all levels.
I'm also dabbing in training LORAs for smaller open models to do data entry and little more (RAG and the likes of it), because that costs a lot of tokens when you pay for them and it makes sense for a company to flat out buy a server with a few H100/200 to do it when you look at the TCO, I've already hit safety limitations when using Opus5.5 to help me through this.