{"slug": "glm-flash", "name": "GLM Flash", "category": "ai", "category_name": "AI models and assistants", "description": "Low-cost, fast-tier GLM language model from Z.ai, used for coding and agent tasks.", "recommenders": 31, "commenters": 47, "warners": 1, "score": 32.428, "rising": 28.35, "first": "2026-01-21", "latest": "2026-10-31", "why": "HN commenters use it as a very cheap daily driver for coding and code review, with several rating it close to or on par with Sonnet-class models.The most common complaint is that it is slow, and some say it gets stuck in thinking loops or writes verbose, Claude-like output.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 32, "neutral": 11, "compare": 5, "warn": 2}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 3, 12, 14], "listed": true, "loved": ["Low cost", "Daily driver"], "caveat": "Slow speed", "short_quote": "I use GLM-5.3-Flash for almost everything (the subscription-subsidized pricing on a legacy Z.ai plan makes it the best value model by a wide margin)", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/jeffhajewski/latticedb", "official_url": "https://z.ai", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["GLM 5.3 Flash", "GLM-5.3-Flash", "GLM 4.7 Flash", "GLM 5.3-flash", "GLM Flash", "GLM-5.3-flash", "GLM 5.3 flash", "GLM-5.3 Flash", "GLM-4.7-Flash", "GLM-4.7 Flash"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters use it as a very cheap daily driver for coding and code review,", "cites": [{"id": 802090928, "item_id": 50130683, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130683", "by": "drob518", "date": "2026-10-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it\u2019s been a pretty good daily workhorse. And you can\u2019t beat the price.", "excerpt": "Interesting. I\u2019ve been using GLM 5.3 Flash for a couple months and found it to be great. What has it been doing that you found to be \u201ctoo clever\u201d? It sometimes gets stuck in loops. I once asked it to do a code review of a simple pattern and it went off on a 45 odyssey trying to analyze too much. But other than those, it\u2019s been a pretty good daily workhorse. And you can\u2019t beat the price. Even Deepseek 4.1 Flash is mor", "context": "", "use_case": "daily coding model", "switched_from": "DeepSeek 4 Flash", "story": "DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017"}, {"id": 795201776, "item_id": 49700111, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700111", "by": "slipwalker", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM-5.3-flash is my current daily runner for coding and reviews", "excerpt": "same here. GLM-5.3-flash is my current daily runner for coding and reviews, and Deepseek-v4 when a second opinion seems beneficial.", "context": "", "use_case": "coding and reviews", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?"}, {"id": 799953680, "item_id": 49997105, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49997105", "by": "wyrdcurt", "date": "2026-10-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use GLM-5.3-Flash for almost everything (the subscription-subsidized pricing on a legacy Z.ai plan makes it the best value model by a wide margin)", "excerpt": "Some people/organizations are ideologically opposed to using Chinese models. Not me, I use GLM-5.3-Flash for almost everything (the subscription-subsidized pricing on a legacy Z.ai plan makes it the best value model by a wide margin), along with some MiMo and DeepSeek. Still, I use Luna for certain tasks where speed is more valuable than performance; I can see this new Haiku displacing Luna for those. If you mean Hai", "context": "", "use_case": "general use", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Haiku 5.5"}, {"id": 800225072, "item_id": 50014067, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50014067", "by": "alexfortin", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use glm-5.3-flash every day for a ludicrous 8.5USD/month and it's as good as DS 4.1 flash, if not better.", "excerpt": "I freak out since months for Z.ai lite subscription, I use glm-5.3-flash every day for a ludicrous 8.5USD/month and it's as good as DS 4.1 flash, if not better.", "context": "", "use_case": "daily coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"}, {"id": 801996096, "item_id": 50124756, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50124756", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We use GLM 5.3 flash in pr review and it catches all sorts of bugs Claudes write", "excerpt": "We use GLM 5.3 flash in pr review and it catches all sorts of bugs Claudes write My tl;dr is that you need to use different model families to check each other's work. Diversity not only improves human work, it also improves agent work!", "context": "", "use_case": "pull request review", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: Anthropic found 36 bugs (6 CVEs) in Pion, OpenAI missed them"}]}, {"text": " with several rating it close to or on par with Sonnet-class models.", "cites": [{"id": 805124432, "item_id": 50320277, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320277", "by": "gambiting", "date": "2026-10-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM 5.3 Flash is incredibly cheap and imho as good as or better than Sonnet.", "excerpt": "GLM 5.3 Flash is incredibly cheap and imho as good as or better than Sonnet. I used it recently to fix an old server that my family had running serving some websites, and by fix it I mean I got it to log in over ssh, figure out what's running there, copy it out, log in to a brand new droplet on DO, set up a fresh instance of apache with everything patched up to latest, copy that ancient content over, make sure it run", "context": "", "use_case": "server migration and fixes", "switched_from": "", "story": "HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN"}, {"id": 800000673, "item_id": 50000042, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000042", "by": "bigyabai", "date": "2026-10-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "5.3 Flash is closer to 5.5 Sonnet/6 Luna capabilities-wise, but still smart enough to implement the easy fixes", "excerpt": "I've been using GLM 5.3 and 5.3 Flash to reverse-engineer some old firmwares, and it hasn't protested at all. Full 5.3 has a scary-good grasp of debugging assembly, QEMU and hex dumps in my experience, it would make for a good \"sleuth\" model to find potential vulns. 5.3 Flash is closer to 5.5 Sonnet/6 Luna capabilities-wise, but still smart enough to implement the easy fixes or steer your red team agent. It's been ab", "context": "", "use_case": "implementing fixes, steering agents", "switched_from": "Claude Code", "story": "Ask HN: Which frontier model can do code security reviews"}]}, {"text": "The most common complaint is that it is slow,", "cites": [{"id": 791706273, "item_id": 49481642, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49481642", "by": "dw_arthur", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Tasks that would normally cost $0.08 on DSV4-Flash have cost me $0.30+ on GLM-5.3-Flash.", "excerpt": "Not in my experience. Tasks that would normally cost $0.08 on DSV4-Flash have cost me $0.30+ on GLM-5.3-Flash. These costs are after Deepseek's recent increase. Also GLM-5.3-Flash is so slow compared to DSV4-Flash. I would be fine with GLM-5.3-Flash if it was cheaper and at the same speed as DSV4. I use DSV4-Flash on Max through Deepseek's API. I have been using GLM-5.3-Flash on High through Openrouter which I though", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.3 is now open-weight"}, {"id": 798997376, "item_id": 49937336, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937336", "by": "esafak", "date": "2026-10-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Flash is plenty good for planning and reviewing, for my needs.", "excerpt": "Flash is plenty good for planning and reviewing, for my needs. In fact, I use it for that because it's too slow for execution, despite the name. edit: I subscribe to z.ai, I don't host.", "context": "subscribes to z.ai", "use_case": "planning and reviewing", "switched_from": "", "story": "One month coding with GLM 5.3 Flash"}, {"id": 791292817, "item_id": 49455801, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49455801", "by": "smartbit", "date": "2026-08-26", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I have both GLM & Gemini in a subscription and see no reason for choosing GLM 5.3 Flash.", "excerpt": "Looking at these numbers IMHO, with Gemini you get the speed what you pay for. Intel Cost lig per ence Task Speed Gemini 3.7 flash 56 0.40 338 GLM 5.3 flash 57 0.09 49 Factor 1 4.4 6.9 I have both GLM & Gemini in a subscription and see no reason for choosing GLM 5.3 Flash. Working with de speed of Gemini 3.7 Flash is such a delight that I accept the hassle of working with Antigravity CLI, coming from Claude Code whic", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.3-Flash Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis"}, {"id": 794813441, "item_id": 49675840, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49675840", "by": "hgoel", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "compare", "quote": "GLM 5.3-flash was also nice, but not too much better for how much slower it is.", "excerpt": "I'm coming up on a month with my 2x GB10 cluster. I was at 1x for a week before I pulled the trigger for the second. Initial setup was a tad annoying because I had to update their firmwares and then power cycle them to get the 200GbE link working at full speed. After setting that up, it has been pretty smooth. I don't directly deal with the cluster, usually I just have the LLM itself handle updates/stopping to load d", "context": "", "use_case": "local inference", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?"}, {"id": 799019408, "item_id": 49938713, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49938713", "by": "desmondl", "date": "2026-10-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Probably viable for day to day work, but he'll have more thoughts next month.", "excerpt": "Yeah, I clicked expecting a review of GLM 5.3 Flash, but the article was more a retrospective about what he learned during his September challenge: \"Only use GLM 5.3 Flash for one month\" He said his experiment was a failure because: 1. He accidentally spent 450M tokens vibe coding with the wrong model, instead of GLM 5.3 Flash. 2. When he used GLM 5.3 Flash, it was sometimes slow. So he switched to other models (Deep", "context": "", "use_case": "coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "One month coding with GLM 5.3 Flash"}]}, {"text": " and some say it gets stuck in thinking loops or writes verbose, Claude-like output.", "cites": [{"id": 802090928, "item_id": 50130683, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130683", "by": "drob518", "date": "2026-10-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it\u2019s been a pretty good daily workhorse. And you can\u2019t beat the price.", "excerpt": "Interesting. I\u2019ve been using GLM 5.3 Flash for a couple months and found it to be great. What has it been doing that you found to be \u201ctoo clever\u201d? It sometimes gets stuck in loops. I once asked it to do a code review of a simple pattern and it went off on a 45 odyssey trying to analyze too much. But other than those, it\u2019s been a pretty good daily workhorse. And you can\u2019t beat the price. Even Deepseek 4.1 Flash is mor", "context": "", "use_case": "daily coding model", "switched_from": "DeepSeek 4 Flash", "story": "DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017"}, {"id": 804330769, "item_id": 50270673, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50270673", "by": "wyrdcurt", "date": "2026-10-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use GLM 5.3 Flash more than any other model and it has the same issues as Mimo.", "excerpt": "I've personally experienced overthinking and the thinking loop issue more often than seeing it not think enough, I know what you mean though. I tried Haiku 5.5 and the most impressive thing about it to me was that it seemed not to overthink when it wasn't necessary, yet it somehow knew when it should spend some more time reasoning about a task. American models are too rich for my blood though. I use GLM 5.3 Flash mor", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5"}, {"id": 794774704, "item_id": 49673419, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673419", "by": "jinnko", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's incredibly capable and cheap, even if it's very verbose and not the fastest.", "excerpt": "I was using various open weights models until glm-5.3-flash came out recently. It's incredibly capable and cheap, even if it's very verbose and not the fastest. I've assigned it to all my agents across my harness and it's getting the job done. Still needs a good steer every now and then, but a great work horse.", "context": "", "use_case": "agent harness work", "switched_from": "open weights models", "story": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?"}, {"id": 801813202, "item_id": 50113325, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50113325", "by": "nullc", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use 5.3-flash a lot, in spite of feeling kind of gross about its language.", "excerpt": "It's not just you-- the claudisms in 5.3 are pathetic and drive me crazy, I was very sad to see it go in that direction and consider it a big step down in that respect. BUT OTOH the performance of 5.3-flash are impossible to argue with-- it has the same pathetic claude behavior full of \"Honest\" and \"lever\" and \"load bearing\" tripe... but it's scortchingly fast on hardware that is pretty slow running 5.2/5.3. As a res", "context": "runs on slow hardware", "use_case": "general use, fast inference", "switched_from": "", "story": "Muse Spark Open"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Low cost", "summary": "Commenters repeatedly call it cheap and the best value for what it can do.", "quotes": [{"id": 795889120, "item_id": 49743070, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743070", "by": "alexjplant", "date": "2026-09-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's dirt cheap especially relative to how capable it is.", "excerpt": "Just use GLM-5.3 Flash via OpenRouter. It's dirt cheap especially relative to how capable it is. While the Z.ai coding plan was a decent deal in the past I always ran into limiting with it and since I use it intermittently for personal projects my usage wasn't always enough to make the math work - the a la carte pricing via OpenRouter makes this a non-issue. There's also a new free stealth model available that's more", "context": "uses it intermittently for personal projects", "use_case": "personal projects, intermittent use", "switched_from": "Z.ai coding plan", "story": "How GLM built its own inference infrastructure"}, {"id": 800234928, "item_id": 50014683, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50014683", "by": "kelnos", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Lately I've been using GLM 5.3 Flash (from Fireworks), and my spend is $1-$2 per day when I use it for coding", "excerpt": "> It's really not cheaper than frontier subscriptions. It depends on how you use it. I used to have the $100/mo Claude plan. I would easily blow through limits when I was on the $20/mo plan, but would rarely hit them when on the $100/mo plan. Lately I've been using GLM 5.3 Flash (from Fireworks), and my spend is $1-$2 per day when I use it for coding, so max $60/mo (less, since I don't use it every day). IIRC DeepSee", "context": "", "use_case": "coding", "switched_from": "Claude", "story": "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"}, {"id": 799953680, "item_id": 49997105, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49997105", "by": "wyrdcurt", "date": "2026-10-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use GLM-5.3-Flash for almost everything (the subscription-subsidized pricing on a legacy Z.ai plan makes it the best value model by a wide margin)", "excerpt": "Some people/organizations are ideologically opposed to using Chinese models. Not me, I use GLM-5.3-Flash for almost everything (the subscription-subsidized pricing on a legacy Z.ai plan makes it the best value model by a wide margin), along with some MiMo and DeepSeek. Still, I use Luna for certain tasks where speed is more valuable than performance; I can see this new Haiku displacing Luna for those. If you mean Hai", "context": "", "use_case": "general use", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Haiku 5.5"}]}, {"label": "Daily driver", "summary": "Many use it as their main everyday model for a wide range of tasks.", "quotes": [{"id": 801752544, "item_id": 50109534, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50109534", "by": "alexpotato", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM 5.3 Flash is an excellent daily driver.", "excerpt": "Been using GLM 5.3 Flash via Ollama Cloud basic subscription: if this is the only model I had to use for the rest of my life, I would be cool with that. It's good at a wide variety of tasks including reverse engineering, design, working with ESP 32 etc. I think Muse Spark 1.3 is better but GLM 5.3 Flash is an excellent daily driver.", "context": "", "use_case": "reverse engineering, design, ESP32", "switched_from": "", "story": "Muse Spark Open"}, {"id": 802090928, "item_id": 50130683, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130683", "by": "drob518", "date": "2026-10-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it\u2019s been a pretty good daily workhorse. And you can\u2019t beat the price.", "excerpt": "Interesting. I\u2019ve been using GLM 5.3 Flash for a couple months and found it to be great. What has it been doing that you found to be \u201ctoo clever\u201d? It sometimes gets stuck in loops. I once asked it to do a code review of a simple pattern and it went off on a 45 odyssey trying to analyze too much. But other than those, it\u2019s been a pretty good daily workhorse. And you can\u2019t beat the price. Even Deepseek 4.1 Flash is mor", "context": "", "use_case": "daily coding model", "switched_from": "DeepSeek 4 Flash", "story": "DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017"}, {"id": 791696432, "item_id": 49481027, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49481027", "by": "a012", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My second favorite model by now is GLM 5.3 flash which is very capable of day to day task.", "excerpt": "My second favorite model by now is GLM 5.3 flash which is very capable of day to day task. I use it as the main model and GLM 5.3 for task that is more complex", "context": "", "use_case": "day-to-day tasks", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.3 is now open-weight"}]}, {"label": "Coding quality", "summary": "Users report it producing solid code, sometimes one-shotting moderately complex tasks.", "quotes": [{"id": 791355904, "item_id": 49459744, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49459744", "by": "freakynit", "date": "2026-08-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "glm-5.3-flash one-shotted it correctly. Luna max couldn't achieve parity even after 3 total attempts.", "excerpt": "It actually can. I have been using it regularly for past 4 days. It is on sol-low level. I deliberately tested it on a moderately complex task. glm-5.3-flash one-shotted it correctly. Luna max couldn't achieve parity even after 3 total attempts. It was creating java bindings for this project: https://github.com/jeffhajewski/latticedb And here is the binding one-shotted by glm-5.3-flash: https://github.com/jeffhajewsk", "context": "", "use_case": "creating Java bindings", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.3-Flash"}, {"id": 792632785, "item_id": 49539549, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49539549", "by": "gere", "date": "2026-09-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM 5.3-flash instead was up for it and the code wasn't bad at all.", "excerpt": "I have mixed feelings about Gemini 3.7 Flash. I used it for a personal project in Java and it was ok: it was crazy fast and it reached the correct result, but the code quality was barely passable. I also used it for a an app for my Garmin watch, and it wasn't good. The code was compiling, but functionality was totally broken and even with a lot of steering it wasn't able to make it work. GLM 5.3-flash instead was up ", "context": "", "use_case": "Garmin app coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber"}, {"id": 805124432, "item_id": 50320277, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320277", "by": "gambiting", "date": "2026-10-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM 5.3 Flash is incredibly cheap and imho as good as or better than Sonnet.", "excerpt": "GLM 5.3 Flash is incredibly cheap and imho as good as or better than Sonnet. I used it recently to fix an old server that my family had running serving some websites, and by fix it I mean I got it to log in over ssh, figure out what's running there, copy it out, log in to a brand new droplet on DO, set up a fresh instance of apache with everything patched up to latest, copy that ancient content over, make sure it run", "context": "", "use_case": "server migration and fixes", "switched_from": "", "story": "HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN"}]}, {"label": "Review and verification", "summary": "It is used for PR review and spec checking, catching bugs other models write.", "quotes": [{"id": 801996096, "item_id": 50124756, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50124756", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We use GLM 5.3 flash in pr review and it catches all sorts of bugs Claudes write", "excerpt": "We use GLM 5.3 flash in pr review and it catches all sorts of bugs Claudes write My tl;dr is that you need to use different model families to check each other's work. Diversity not only improves human work, it also improves agent work!", "context": "", "use_case": "pull request review", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: Anthropic found 36 bugs (6 CVEs) in Pion, OpenAI missed them"}, {"id": 796988003, "item_id": 49811750, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49811750", "by": "sieve", "date": "2026-09-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "perfectly capable of following my spec and then poking holes in the implementation", "excerpt": "I used to read the code till around May. Now I don't. Instead I validate behavior. And have multiple LLMs verify that the code implements my handwritten spec. MiMo 2.5/2.6, MuseSpark 1.3, DeepSeek V4/4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash are perfectly capable of following my spec and then poking holes in the implementation till there are none left.", "context": "validates behavior instead of reading code", "use_case": "spec implementation and verification", "switched_from": "", "story": "GPT-6 Sol and Luna"}, {"id": 798997376, "item_id": 49937336, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937336", "by": "esafak", "date": "2026-10-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Flash is plenty good for planning and reviewing, for my needs.", "excerpt": "Flash is plenty good for planning and reviewing, for my needs. In fact, I use it for that because it's too slow for execution, despite the name. edit: I subscribe to z.ai, I don't host.", "context": "subscribes to z.ai", "use_case": "planning and reviewing", "switched_from": "", "story": "One month coding with GLM 5.3 Flash"}]}, {"label": "Local open weights", "summary": "Commenters value that it is an open-weight model they can run locally.", "quotes": [{"id": 762886144, "item_id": 47680384, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680384", "by": "kamranjon", "date": "2026-04-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM 4.7 Flash is the main model I use locally for agentic coding work, it's pretty incredible.", "excerpt": "I'm crossing my fingers they release a flash version of this. GLM 4.7 Flash is the main model I use locally for agentic coding work, it's pretty incredible. Didn't find anything in the release about it - but hoping it's on the horizon.", "context": "", "use_case": "local agentic coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks"}, {"id": 794782032, "item_id": 49673877, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673877", "by": "VariousPrograms", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's the first local-ish model that feels capable enough to be a default model to me (and it's very cheap).", "excerpt": "GLM 5.3 Flash for personal hobby stuff. It's the first local-ish model that feels capable enough to be a default model to me (and it's very cheap). I'd rather get addicted to an open weight LLM in a class I can theoretically run if consumers ever get access to RAM again and can't get taken away from me. Locally I use Deepseek Flash, Qwen3.8-Next-Flash, or Gemma 4 depending on how slowly I want my slop to generate.", "context": "", "use_case": "personal hobby projects", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?"}, {"id": 793113473, "item_id": 49569592, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49569592", "by": "springtimesun", "date": "2026-09-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I have been using a PR branch to run GLM 5.3 flash locally", "excerpt": "I have been using a PR branch to run GLM 5.3 flash locally so I have been watching the dueling PRs develop to implement it and all the comments and reviews. You're right the scale of it is huge. The speed with which maintainers and community are responding is also super impressive. I know there's a lot of discussion about AI overwhelming OS maintainers and I can see that. It does seem like llama.cpp is successfully r", "context": "", "use_case": "local inference", "switched_from": "", "story": "Georgi Gerganov on llama.cpp/ggml future after Nvidia acquisition of HuggingFace"}]}, {"label": "Reverse engineering", "summary": "Users find it good at reverse engineering and tracking down bug causes.", "quotes": [{"id": 800000673, "item_id": 50000042, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000042", "by": "bigyabai", "date": "2026-10-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "5.3 Flash is closer to 5.5 Sonnet/6 Luna capabilities-wise, but still smart enough to implement the easy fixes", "excerpt": "I've been using GLM 5.3 and 5.3 Flash to reverse-engineer some old firmwares, and it hasn't protested at all. Full 5.3 has a scary-good grasp of debugging assembly, QEMU and hex dumps in my experience, it would make for a good \"sleuth\" model to find potential vulns. 5.3 Flash is closer to 5.5 Sonnet/6 Luna capabilities-wise, but still smart enough to implement the easy fixes or steer your red team agent. It's been ab", "context": "", "use_case": "implementing fixes, steering agents", "switched_from": "Claude Code", "story": "Ask HN: Which frontier model can do code security reviews"}, {"id": 792664721, "item_id": 49541545, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541545", "by": "WASDx", "date": "2026-09-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM-5.3-Flash which for this use case has been clearly better at finding suspected causes", "excerpt": "I'm party using 1.2 to reverse engineer and re-implement an old game binary and it has been quite good and fast. The contributor pricing is very attractive, excited to try 1.3 and see if I feel a difference. 1.2 can get stuck outputting similar sounding thought summaries with no apparent progress when asked to solve bugs. Then I've switched to GLM-5.3-Flash which for this use case has been clearly better at finding s", "context": "", "use_case": "debugging reverse engineering", "switched_from": "Muse Spark 1.2", "story": "Muse Spark 1.3"}, {"id": 801752544, "item_id": 50109534, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50109534", "by": "alexpotato", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM 5.3 Flash is an excellent daily driver.", "excerpt": "Been using GLM 5.3 Flash via Ollama Cloud basic subscription: if this is the only model I had to use for the rest of my life, I would be cool with that. It's good at a wide variety of tasks including reverse engineering, design, working with ESP 32 etc. I think Muse Spark 1.3 is better but GLM 5.3 Flash is an excellent daily driver.", "context": "", "use_case": "reverse engineering, design, ESP32", "switched_from": "", "story": "Muse Spark Open"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Slow speed", "summary": "Several users find it slow compared with alternatives such as Gemini Flash and DeepSeek Flash.", "quotes": [{"id": 791706273, "item_id": 49481642, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49481642", "by": "dw_arthur", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Tasks that would normally cost $0.08 on DSV4-Flash have cost me $0.30+ on GLM-5.3-Flash.", "excerpt": "Not in my experience. Tasks that would normally cost $0.08 on DSV4-Flash have cost me $0.30+ on GLM-5.3-Flash. These costs are after Deepseek's recent increase. Also GLM-5.3-Flash is so slow compared to DSV4-Flash. I would be fine with GLM-5.3-Flash if it was cheaper and at the same speed as DSV4. I use DSV4-Flash on Max through Deepseek's API. I have been using GLM-5.3-Flash on High through Openrouter which I though", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.3 is now open-weight"}, {"id": 791292817, "item_id": 49455801, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49455801", "by": "smartbit", "date": "2026-08-26", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I have both GLM & Gemini in a subscription and see no reason for choosing GLM 5.3 Flash.", "excerpt": "Looking at these numbers IMHO, with Gemini you get the speed what you pay for. Intel Cost lig per ence Task Speed Gemini 3.7 flash 56 0.40 338 GLM 5.3 flash 57 0.09 49 Factor 1 4.4 6.9 I have both GLM & Gemini in a subscription and see no reason for choosing GLM 5.3 Flash. Working with de speed of Gemini 3.7 Flash is such a delight that I accept the hassle of working with Antigravity CLI, coming from Claude Code whic", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.3-Flash Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis"}, {"id": 794813441, "item_id": 49675840, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49675840", "by": "hgoel", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "compare", "quote": "GLM 5.3-flash was also nice, but not too much better for how much slower it is.", "excerpt": "I'm coming up on a month with my 2x GB10 cluster. I was at 1x for a week before I pulled the trigger for the second. Initial setup was a tad annoying because I had to update their firmwares and then power cycle them to get the 200GbE link working at full speed. After setting that up, it has been pretty smooth. I don't directly deal with the cluster, usually I just have the LLM itself handle updates/stopping to load d", "context": "", "use_case": "local inference", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?"}]}, {"label": "Loops and overthinking", "summary": "It sometimes gets stuck in thinking loops or overanalyzes simple requests.", "quotes": [{"id": 802090928, "item_id": 50130683, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130683", "by": "drob518", "date": "2026-10-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it\u2019s been a pretty good daily workhorse. And you can\u2019t beat the price.", "excerpt": "Interesting. I\u2019ve been using GLM 5.3 Flash for a couple months and found it to be great. What has it been doing that you found to be \u201ctoo clever\u201d? It sometimes gets stuck in loops. I once asked it to do a code review of a simple pattern and it went off on a 45 odyssey trying to analyze too much. But other than those, it\u2019s been a pretty good daily workhorse. And you can\u2019t beat the price. Even Deepseek 4.1 Flash is mor", "context": "", "use_case": "daily coding model", "switched_from": "DeepSeek 4 Flash", "story": "DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017"}, {"id": 804330769, "item_id": 50270673, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50270673", "by": "wyrdcurt", "date": "2026-10-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use GLM 5.3 Flash more than any other model and it has the same issues as Mimo.", "excerpt": "I've personally experienced overthinking and the thinking loop issue more often than seeing it not think enough, I know what you mean though. I tried Haiku 5.5 and the most impressive thing about it to me was that it seemed not to overthink when it wasn't necessary, yet it somehow knew when it should spend some more time reasoning about a task. American models are too rich for my blood though. I use GLM 5.3 Flash mor", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5"}]}, {"label": "Verbose style", "summary": "Some dislike its verbosity and Claude-like phrasing.", "quotes": [{"id": 801813202, "item_id": 50113325, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50113325", "by": "nullc", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use 5.3-flash a lot, in spite of feeling kind of gross about its language.", "excerpt": "It's not just you-- the claudisms in 5.3 are pathetic and drive me crazy, I was very sad to see it go in that direction and consider it a big step down in that respect. BUT OTOH the performance of 5.3-flash are impossible to argue with-- it has the same pathetic claude behavior full of \"Honest\" and \"lever\" and \"load bearing\" tripe... but it's scortchingly fast on hardware that is pretty slow running 5.2/5.3. As a res", "context": "runs on slow hardware", "use_case": "general use, fast inference", "switched_from": "", "story": "Muse Spark Open"}, {"id": 794774704, "item_id": 49673419, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673419", "by": "jinnko", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's incredibly capable and cheap, even if it's very verbose and not the fastest.", "excerpt": "I was using various open weights models until glm-5.3-flash came out recently. It's incredibly capable and cheap, even if it's very verbose and not the fastest. I've assigned it to all my agents across my harness and it's getting the job done. Still needs a good steer every now and then, but a great work horse.", "context": "", "use_case": "agent harness work", "switched_from": "open weights models", "story": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?"}]}, {"label": "Plan limits", "summary": "Users on the Z.ai coding plan report hitting usage limits.", "quotes": [{"id": 795889120, "item_id": 49743070, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743070", "by": "alexjplant", "date": "2026-09-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's dirt cheap especially relative to how capable it is.", "excerpt": "Just use GLM-5.3 Flash via OpenRouter. It's dirt cheap especially relative to how capable it is. While the Z.ai coding plan was a decent deal in the past I always ran into limiting with it and since I use it intermittently for personal projects my usage wasn't always enough to make the math work - the a la carte pricing via OpenRouter makes this a non-issue. There's also a new free stealth model available that's more", "context": "uses it intermittently for personal projects", "use_case": "personal projects, intermittent use", "switched_from": "Z.ai coding plan", "story": "How GLM built its own inference infrastructure"}, {"id": 800195344, "item_id": 50012209, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50012209", "by": "crossroadsguy", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "compared to GLM-5.3-flash via ZAI's Coding Plan? Because that's what I use", "excerpt": "What is the cost of access like for DeepSeek-v4.1-flash, compared to GLM-5.3-flash via ZAI's Coding Plan? Because that's what I use; and often hit the \"wait\". I wouldn't mind trying a new model subscription or even API access which hits around glm-5.3-flash level weight class (which seem to be enough for me; with quite some human suprvision and nudging) but gives muuuuuuch moooore tokens for the same price. (And what", "context": "", "use_case": "coding via ZAI Coding Plan", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"}]}, {"label": "Below frontier", "summary": "Some say it trails frontier models and needs steering on harder tasks.", "quotes": [{"id": 792302677, "item_id": 49518917, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518917", "by": "terhechte", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Qwen 3.8 and GLM 5.3 Flash daily", "excerpt": "It is the point. Also open source model enthusiast tell you otherwise, there is a coding quality gap between these models. If I use DeepSeek, I do so knowing that I have to limit to simpler tasks on smaller, well specified prompts. What the author did, letting the model do the planning, is not something DeepSeek will excel at. I'm using GPT (Terra, Sol, Luna), Claude (Opus 5, Fable), Qwen 3.8 and GLM 5.3 Flash daily ", "context": "", "use_case": "coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too"}, {"id": 791500673, "item_id": 49468792, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49468792", "by": "yipinwong", "date": "2026-08-27", "stance": "compare", "quote": "why Luna is still more compelling than GLM-5.3-flash.", "excerpt": "\"Small models\" nowadays work like someone who has IQ 100+ while SOTA ones are like 150, \"relatively\". Given sheer number of turns I can make with small models, I can do a lotta stufff - cheaper, and faster Harness makes differences: There have been many HN posts about how one made tiny models work better at certain tasks using harnesses. These \"small\" models with right context, and guidance, they work wonders. --- I'", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Small Models Have Arrived"}, {"id": 794774704, "item_id": 49673419, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673419", "by": "jinnko", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's incredibly capable and cheap, even if it's very verbose and not the fastest.", "excerpt": "I was using various open weights models until glm-5.3-flash came out recently. It's incredibly capable and cheap, even if it's very verbose and not the fastest. I've assigned it to all my agents across my harness and it's getting the job done. Still needs a good steer every now and then, but a great work horse.", "context": "", "use_case": "agent harness work", "switched_from": "open weights models", "story": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?"}]}, {"label": "Variable cost", "summary": "One user found tasks cost several times more than on DeepSeek V4 Flash.", "quotes": [{"id": 791706273, "item_id": 49481642, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49481642", "by": "dw_arthur", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Tasks that would normally cost $0.08 on DSV4-Flash have cost me $0.30+ on GLM-5.3-Flash.", "excerpt": "Not in my experience. Tasks that would normally cost $0.08 on DSV4-Flash have cost me $0.30+ on GLM-5.3-Flash. These costs are after Deepseek's recent increase. Also GLM-5.3-Flash is so slow compared to DSV4-Flash. I would be fine with GLM-5.3-Flash if it was cheaper and at the same speed as DSV4. I use DSV4-Flash on Max through Deepseek's API. I have been using GLM-5.3-Flash on High through Openrouter which I though", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.3 is now open-weight"}]}], "who": [{"by": "d2kx", "context": "EU-based company, B2B2C app", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50290261", "date": "2026-10-29"}, {"by": "colingauvin", "context": "runs models locally", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50122657", "date": "2026-10-16"}, {"by": "nullc", "context": "runs on slow hardware", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50113325", "date": "2026-10-16"}, {"by": "esafak", "context": "subscribes to z.ai", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937336", "date": "2026-10-02"}, {"by": "sieve", "context": "validates behavior instead of reading code", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49811750", "date": "2026-09-23"}, {"by": "alexjplant", "context": "uses it intermittently for personal projects", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743070", "date": "2026-09-17"}, {"by": "kamranjon", "context": "runs fully local", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48764703", "date": "2026-07-02"}], "tags": ["for coding agents", "for code review", "runs locally", "for reverse engineering", "for budget-conscious users"], "use_cases": ["coding", "implementation", "local inference", "server migration and fixes", "document building blocks, custom tools", "prototyping a game"], "compared": [{"slug": "deepseek-v4-flash", "name": "DeepSeek V4 Flash", "co": 20, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "qwen-3-8", "name": "Qwen 3.8", "co": 6, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "glm", "name": "GLM", "co": 7, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude", "name": "Claude", "co": 4, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude-opus", "name": "Claude Opus", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "deepseek", "name": "DeepSeek", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "pi", "name": "Pi", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "muse-spark", "name": "Muse Spark", "co": 3, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49672966", "title": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?", "mentions": 6}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000488", "title": "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50107379", "title": "Muse Spark Open", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449507", "title": "GLM-5.3-Flash", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50129045", "title": "DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49934620", "title": "One month coding with GLM 5.3 Flash", "mentions": 2}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"compare": 3, "recommend": 3, "warn": 1}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 4, "recommend": 12, "compare": 2}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 14, "neutral": 5}}, "quotes": [{"id": 805124432, "item_id": 50320277, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320277", "by": "gambiting", "date": "2026-10-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM 5.3 Flash is incredibly cheap and imho as good as or better than Sonnet.", "excerpt": "GLM 5.3 Flash is incredibly cheap and imho as good as or better than Sonnet. I used it recently to fix an old server that my family had running serving some websites, and by fix it I mean I got it to log in over ssh, figure out what's running there, copy it out, log in to a brand new droplet on DO, set up a fresh instance of apache with everything patched up to latest, copy that ancient content over, make sure it run", "context": "", "use_case": "server migration and fixes", "switched_from": "", "story": "HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN"}, {"id": 804644177, "item_id": 50290261, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50290261", "by": "d2kx", "date": "2026-10-29", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "We use Mistral Large 4, GLM 5.3 Flash and DeepSeek v4.1 Flash 1017 through their API", "excerpt": "Mistral has been great for us as a provider for our EU-based company. We use Mistral Large 4, GLM 5.3 Flash and DeepSeek v4.1 Flash 1017 through their API for our B2B2C app for complex work around building blocks for documents and custom tools. A few months ago we weren't sure which EU provider to use, but since they introduced 3rd party models, added more features (now Responses API etc.) and improved their own mode", "context": "EU-based company, B2B2C app", "use_case": "document building blocks, custom tools", "switched_from": "", "story": "We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4"}, {"id": 804382225, "item_id": 50273889, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50273889", "by": "Sphax", "date": "2026-10-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used Sol and GLM 5.3 Flash to produce a prototype of a tower defense game for myself, and it works just fine.", "excerpt": "I'm not looking forward to playing vibe coded games, but yes I feel like models are good enough today to write small scoped games. I used Sol and GLM 5.3 Flash to produce a prototype of a tower defense game for myself, and it works just fine. I _am_ looking forward however to game developers using AI to debug and optimize their games. Let's squeeze all the performance we can get from existing hardware.", "context": "", "use_case": "prototyping a game", "switched_from": "", "story": "The October inflection point for vibe game development"}, {"id": 804330769, "item_id": 50270673, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50270673", "by": "wyrdcurt", "date": "2026-10-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use GLM 5.3 Flash more than any other model and it has the same issues as Mimo.", "excerpt": "I've personally experienced overthinking and the thinking loop issue more often than seeing it not think enough, I know what you mean though. I tried Haiku 5.5 and the most impressive thing about it to me was that it seemed not to overthink when it wasn't necessary, yet it somehow knew when it should spend some more time reasoning about a task. American models are too rich for my blood though. I use GLM 5.3 Flash mor", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5"}, {"id": 803538659, "item_id": 50221166, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50221166", "by": "kelvinjps10", "date": "2026-10-24", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "glm flash for implementation", "excerpt": "20$ chatgpt plus sub with pi harness and a few api credits in openrouter.sometiemd I use sol for planing and glm flash for implementation bu", "context": "", "use_case": "implementation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed"}, {"id": 802090928, "item_id": 50130683, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50130683", "by": "drob518", "date": "2026-10-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it\u2019s been a pretty good daily workhorse. And you can\u2019t beat the price.", "excerpt": "Interesting. I\u2019ve been using GLM 5.3 Flash for a couple months and found it to be great. What has it been doing that you found to be \u201ctoo clever\u201d? It sometimes gets stuck in loops. I once asked it to do a code review of a simple pattern and it went off on a 45 odyssey trying to analyze too much. But other than those, it\u2019s been a pretty good daily workhorse. And you can\u2019t beat the price. Even Deepseek 4.1 Flash is mor", "context": "", "use_case": "daily coding model", "switched_from": "DeepSeek 4 Flash", "story": "DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017"}, {"id": 802068866, "item_id": 50129304, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50129304", "by": "egeozcan", "date": "2026-10-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the rest can be happily done with deepseek or glm flash", "excerpt": "I use Opus for planning, through API on medium thinking, it doesn't cost anything significant and the rest can be happily done with deepseek or glm flash. Using sol 6.1 for review loops at the end. All running on pi. A very complex task tends to cost like 10$ max. It's comparable to a subscription with enormous flexibility. It's a steal.", "context": "", "use_case": "implementation", "switched_from": "", "story": "DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017"}, {"id": 801996096, "item_id": 50124756, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50124756", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We use GLM 5.3 flash in pr review and it catches all sorts of bugs Claudes write", "excerpt": "We use GLM 5.3 flash in pr review and it catches all sorts of bugs Claudes write My tl;dr is that you need to use different model families to check each other's work. Diversity not only improves human work, it also improves agent work!", "context": "", "use_case": "pull request review", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: Anthropic found 36 bugs (6 CVEs) in Pion, OpenAI missed them"}, {"id": 801962512, "item_id": 50122657, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50122657", "by": "colingauvin", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM 5.3 Flash feels like a major step up from Qwen", "excerpt": "I was running DS731 until Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (so what, like a couple weeks? The pace has been torrid). I switched to Qwen for image input, then GLM 5.3 Flash. At the time, Qwen felt like a minor step down from DS731, GLM 5.3 Flash feels like a major step up from Qwen, so I'd say slightly better than DS731. I realize that's not exactly what the benchmarks say, but DS731 definitely flailed around on some of the more c", "context": "runs models locally", "use_case": "local model for challenging tasks", "switched_from": "Qwen 3.8 Flash Next", "story": "Muse Spark Open"}, {"id": 801813202, "item_id": 50113325, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50113325", "by": "nullc", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use 5.3-flash a lot, in spite of feeling kind of gross about its language.", "excerpt": "It's not just you-- the claudisms in 5.3 are pathetic and drive me crazy, I was very sad to see it go in that direction and consider it a big step down in that respect. BUT OTOH the performance of 5.3-flash are impossible to argue with-- it has the same pathetic claude behavior full of \"Honest\" and \"lever\" and \"load bearing\" tripe... but it's scortchingly fast on hardware that is pretty slow running 5.2/5.3. As a res", "context": "runs on slow hardware", "use_case": "general use, fast inference", "switched_from": "", "story": "Muse Spark Open"}, {"id": 801752544, "item_id": 50109534, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50109534", "by": "alexpotato", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM 5.3 Flash is an excellent daily driver.", "excerpt": "Been using GLM 5.3 Flash via Ollama Cloud basic subscription: if this is the only model I had to use for the rest of my life, I would be cool with that. It's good at a wide variety of tasks including reverse engineering, design, working with ESP 32 etc. I think Muse Spark 1.3 is better but GLM 5.3 Flash is an excellent daily driver.", "context": "", "use_case": "reverse engineering, design, ESP32", "switched_from": "", "story": "Muse Spark Open"}, {"id": 800548800, "item_id": 50034300, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50034300", "by": "desireco42", "date": "2026-10-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use GLM Flash mostly.", "excerpt": "Yeah my agents do spend a little bit more time with it, and I use GLM Flash mostly. Gleam has good error messages which helps a lot. But once they write something it is much more solid.", "context": "", "use_case": "coding agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Next.js 16.4"}, {"id": 800242065, "item_id": 50015129, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50015129", "by": "lisplist", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "if you're VRAM constrained, take a look at GLM 5.3 Flash or Qwen 3.8 Flash Next", "excerpt": "DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is mixed MXFP4/MXFP8 so all but the INT4 calculation is wrong here and that's still wrong because you can run it on < 400GB VRAM. The n-gram table is MXFP8, but can be offloaded to RAM or disk without too much of a performance hit. Really, you could probably cram it onto < 300GB VRAM if you're willing to apply a small quant to certain parts of the model considering how little VRAM is dedicated to ", "context": "", "use_case": "VRAM-constrained local inference", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"}, {"id": 800234928, "item_id": 50014683, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50014683", "by": "kelnos", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Lately I've been using GLM 5.3 Flash (from Fireworks), and my spend is $1-$2 per day when I use it for coding", "excerpt": "> It's really not cheaper than frontier subscriptions. It depends on how you use it. I used to have the $100/mo Claude plan. I would easily blow through limits when I was on the $20/mo plan, but would rarely hit them when on the $100/mo plan. Lately I've been using GLM 5.3 Flash (from Fireworks), and my spend is $1-$2 per day when I use it for coding, so max $60/mo (less, since I don't use it every day). IIRC DeepSee", "context": "", "use_case": "coding", "switched_from": "Claude", "story": "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"}, {"id": 800225072, "item_id": 50014067, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50014067", "by": "alexfortin", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use glm-5.3-flash every day for a ludicrous 8.5USD/month and it's as good as DS 4.1 flash, if not better.", "excerpt": "I freak out since months for Z.ai lite subscription, I use glm-5.3-flash every day for a ludicrous 8.5USD/month and it's as good as DS 4.1 flash, if not better.", "context": "", "use_case": "daily coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"}, {"id": 800195344, "item_id": 50012209, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50012209", "by": "crossroadsguy", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "compared to GLM-5.3-flash via ZAI's Coding Plan? Because that's what I use", "excerpt": "What is the cost of access like for DeepSeek-v4.1-flash, compared to GLM-5.3-flash via ZAI's Coding Plan? Because that's what I use; and often hit the \"wait\". I wouldn't mind trying a new model subscription or even API access which hits around glm-5.3-flash level weight class (which seem to be enough for me; with quite some human suprvision and nudging) but gives muuuuuuch moooore tokens for the same price. (And what", "context": "", "use_case": "coding via ZAI Coding Plan", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"}, {"id": 800000673, "item_id": 50000042, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000042", "by": "bigyabai", "date": "2026-10-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "5.3 Flash is closer to 5.5 Sonnet/6 Luna capabilities-wise, but still smart enough to implement the easy fixes", "excerpt": "I've been using GLM 5.3 and 5.3 Flash to reverse-engineer some old firmwares, and it hasn't protested at all. Full 5.3 has a scary-good grasp of debugging assembly, QEMU and hex dumps in my experience, it would make for a good \"sleuth\" model to find potential vulns. 5.3 Flash is closer to 5.5 Sonnet/6 Luna capabilities-wise, but still smart enough to implement the easy fixes or steer your red team agent. It's been ab", "context": "", "use_case": "implementing fixes, steering agents", "switched_from": "Claude Code", "story": "Ask HN: Which frontier model can do code security reviews"}, {"id": 799953680, "item_id": 49997105, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49997105", "by": "wyrdcurt", "date": "2026-10-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use GLM-5.3-Flash for almost everything (the subscription-subsidized pricing on a legacy Z.ai plan makes it the best value model by a wide margin)", "excerpt": "Some people/organizations are ideologically opposed to using Chinese models. Not me, I use GLM-5.3-Flash for almost everything (the subscription-subsidized pricing on a legacy Z.ai plan makes it the best value model by a wide margin), along with some MiMo and DeepSeek. Still, I use Luna for certain tasks where speed is more valuable than performance; I can see this new Haiku displacing Luna for those. If you mean Hai", "context": "", "use_case": "general use", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Haiku 5.5"}, {"id": 799019408, "item_id": 49938713, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49938713", "by": "desmondl", "date": "2026-10-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Probably viable for day to day work, but he'll have more thoughts next month.", "excerpt": "Yeah, I clicked expecting a review of GLM 5.3 Flash, but the article was more a retrospective about what he learned during his September challenge: \"Only use GLM 5.3 Flash for one month\" He said his experiment was a failure because: 1. He accidentally spent 450M tokens vibe coding with the wrong model, instead of GLM 5.3 Flash. 2. When he used GLM 5.3 Flash, it was sometimes slow. So he switched to other models (Deep", "context": "", "use_case": "coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "One month coding with GLM 5.3 Flash"}, {"id": 798997376, "item_id": 49937336, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937336", "by": "esafak", "date": "2026-10-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Flash is plenty good for planning and reviewing, for my needs.", "excerpt": "Flash is plenty good for planning and reviewing, for my needs. In fact, I use it for that because it's too slow for execution, despite the name. edit: I subscribe to z.ai, I don't host.", "context": "subscribes to z.ai", "use_case": "planning and reviewing", "switched_from": "", "story": "One month coding with GLM 5.3 Flash"}, {"id": 798406803, "item_id": 49900425, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49900425", "by": "reachableceo", "date": "2026-09-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I am using zcode with GLM5.3 flash from z.ai", "excerpt": "I mean it\u2019s not exactly tin foil hat. I suspect when we see the s1 drop for these companies , the business plan will be essentially exactly what you just said. OpenWebUI has allowed me to avoid this. Combined with OpenTerminal. I am using zcode with GLM5.3 flash from z.ai due to the extra usage / air drops etc . However nothing I\u2019m doing is tied to that harness. When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I di", "context": "", "use_case": "coding model", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dots: Always-on agents"}, {"id": 798365937, "item_id": 49897871, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49897871", "by": "LeBit", "date": "2026-09-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use DS4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash, pay peanuts per day and get more than acceptable results.", "excerpt": "Yup. I see posts about OpenAI and Anthropic latest and don\u2019t even care looking at what they do better. I just read the comments here. I use DS4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash, pay peanuts per day and get more than acceptable results.", "context": "", "use_case": "cheap daily AI use", "switched_from": "", "story": "GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price"}, {"id": 796988003, "item_id": 49811750, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49811750", "by": "sieve", "date": "2026-09-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "perfectly capable of following my spec and then poking holes in the implementation", "excerpt": "I used to read the code till around May. Now I don't. Instead I validate behavior. And have multiple LLMs verify that the code implements my handwritten spec. MiMo 2.5/2.6, MuseSpark 1.3, DeepSeek V4/4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash are perfectly capable of following my spec and then poking holes in the implementation till there are none left.", "context": "validates behavior instead of reading code", "use_case": "spec implementation and verification", "switched_from": "", "story": "GPT-6 Sol and Luna"}, {"id": 796262418, "item_id": 49766401, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49766401", "by": "Frannky", "date": "2026-09-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "GLM 5.3 Flash as the default task-vision model", "excerpt": "I switched to oh-my-py and never looked back. I guess having an incentive to maximize (expensive) token usage, and LLMs degrading with higher context, isn't aligned with a user's best interest. Oh-my-py unlocks max capabilities at the smartest token usage, and you can change AI company and providers while still getting things done. Roles, advisor, and the ability to use Chinese models on international providers with ", "context": "", "use_case": "default task and vision model", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md"}, {"id": 796029793, "item_id": 49751862, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49751862", "by": "barrenko", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "sending image based pdf pages to glm flash 5.3, not sure how to address / test it properly", "excerpt": "I use Gemini(s) because I can send pdfs as files to their API and not worry too much. I've started to diverge and consacrate a part of my pipeline to sending image based pdf pages to glm flash 5.3, not sure how to address / test it properly. Long term I have fears I can't depend of the Google's AI api.", "context": "", "use_case": "image-based PDF pages", "switched_from": "", "story": "Qwen 3.8 Omni Flash"}, {"id": 795889120, "item_id": 49743070, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743070", "by": "alexjplant", "date": "2026-09-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's dirt cheap especially relative to how capable it is.", "excerpt": "Just use GLM-5.3 Flash via OpenRouter. It's dirt cheap especially relative to how capable it is. While the Z.ai coding plan was a decent deal in the past I always ran into limiting with it and since I use it intermittently for personal projects my usage wasn't always enough to make the math work - the a la carte pricing via OpenRouter makes this a non-issue. There's also a new free stealth model available that's more", "context": "uses it intermittently for personal projects", "use_case": "personal projects, intermittent use", "switched_from": "Z.ai coding plan", "story": "How GLM built its own inference infrastructure"}, {"id": 795201776, "item_id": 49700111, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700111", "by": "slipwalker", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM-5.3-flash is my current daily runner for coding and reviews", "excerpt": "same here. GLM-5.3-flash is my current daily runner for coding and reviews, and Deepseek-v4 when a second opinion seems beneficial.", "context": "", "use_case": "coding and reviews", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?"}, {"id": 794813441, "item_id": 49675840, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49675840", "by": "hgoel", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "compare", "quote": "GLM 5.3-flash was also nice, but not too much better for how much slower it is.", "excerpt": "I'm coming up on a month with my 2x GB10 cluster. I was at 1x for a week before I pulled the trigger for the second. Initial setup was a tad annoying because I had to update their firmwares and then power cycle them to get the 200GbE link working at full speed. After setting that up, it has been pretty smooth. I don't directly deal with the cluster, usually I just have the LLM itself handle updates/stopping to load d", "context": "", "use_case": "local inference", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?"}, {"id": 794782032, "item_id": 49673877, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673877", "by": "VariousPrograms", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's the first local-ish model that feels capable enough to be a default model to me (and it's very cheap).", "excerpt": "GLM 5.3 Flash for personal hobby stuff. It's the first local-ish model that feels capable enough to be a default model to me (and it's very cheap). I'd rather get addicted to an open weight LLM in a class I can theoretically run if consumers ever get access to RAM again and can't get taken away from me. Locally I use Deepseek Flash, Qwen3.8-Next-Flash, or Gemma 4 depending on how slowly I want my slop to generate.", "context": "", "use_case": "personal hobby projects", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?"}, {"id": 794774704, "item_id": 49673419, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673419", "by": "jinnko", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's incredibly capable and cheap, even if it's very verbose and not the fastest.", "excerpt": "I was using various open weights models until glm-5.3-flash came out recently. It's incredibly capable and cheap, even if it's very verbose and not the fastest. I've assigned it to all my agents across my harness and it's getting the job done. Still needs a good steer every now and then, but a great work horse.", "context": "", "use_case": "agent harness work", "switched_from": "open weights models", "story": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?"}, {"id": 794774369, "item_id": 49673398, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673398", "by": "ewindisch", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm using a lot of gpt-5.6-Luna and glm-5.3-flash.", "excerpt": "I'm using a lot of gpt-5.6-Luna and glm-5.3-flash. Astra is really fantastic but it's too expensive. I average about 50-90B/tok/mo.", "context": "", "use_case": "high-volume coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?"}, {"id": 794774112, "item_id": 49673382, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673382", "by": "philbo", "date": "2026-09-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Glm-5.3-flash for me. I like faster models because I stay involved all the way through.", "excerpt": "Glm-5.3-flash for me. I like faster models because I stay involved all the way through. I don't delegate full control to the agent because it's harder to understand the end result that way.", "context": "", "use_case": "agentic coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?"}, {"id": 793113473, "item_id": 49569592, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49569592", "by": "springtimesun", "date": "2026-09-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I have been using a PR branch to run GLM 5.3 flash locally", "excerpt": "I have been using a PR branch to run GLM 5.3 flash locally so I have been watching the dueling PRs develop to implement it and all the comments and reviews. You're right the scale of it is huge. The speed with which maintainers and community are responding is also super impressive. I know there's a lot of discussion about AI overwhelming OS maintainers and I can see that. It does seem like llama.cpp is successfully r", "context": "", "use_case": "local inference", "switched_from": "", "story": "Georgi Gerganov on llama.cpp/ggml future after Nvidia acquisition of HuggingFace"}, {"id": 792733392, "item_id": 49545837, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49545837", "by": "zackify", "date": "2026-09-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have been using glm 5.3 flash and it feels as good as opus 5.", "excerpt": "I have been using glm 5.3 flash and it feels as good as opus 5. Put a lot of work into it this week (100m tokens). Now I'm curious to try this one. These smaller models are getting very good imo", "context": "", "use_case": "coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Muse Spark 1.3"}, {"id": 792729939, "item_id": 49545621, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49545621", "by": "internet101010", "date": "2026-09-03", "stance": "compare", "quote": "glm-5.3-flash and gpt-5.6-sol both suggested the guy standing in the hallway", "excerpt": "I used to think that until about an hour ago. I am redoing my homelab and asked four agents in Buzz (5.6-sol, opus-5, fable-5.1, glm-5.3-flash) to use references from Hackers (1995) to answer two questions: 1. What should the terraform repo name be? 2. What should the avatar image be? Obviously all four said \"gibson\" for question #1. But for #2 is where things got interesting. glm-5.3-flash and gpt-5.6-sol both sugge", "context": "redoing a homelab", "use_case": "homelab naming and creative suggestions", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"}, {"id": 792664721, "item_id": 49541545, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49541545", "by": "WASDx", "date": "2026-09-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM-5.3-Flash which for this use case has been clearly better at finding suspected causes", "excerpt": "I'm party using 1.2 to reverse engineer and re-implement an old game binary and it has been quite good and fast. The contributor pricing is very attractive, excited to try 1.3 and see if I feel a difference. 1.2 can get stuck outputting similar sounding thought summaries with no apparent progress when asked to solve bugs. Then I've switched to GLM-5.3-Flash which for this use case has been clearly better at finding s", "context": "", "use_case": "debugging reverse engineering", "switched_from": "Muse Spark 1.2", "story": "Muse Spark 1.3"}, {"id": 792632785, "item_id": 49539549, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49539549", "by": "gere", "date": "2026-09-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "GLM 5.3-flash instead was up for it and the code wasn't bad at all.", "excerpt": "I have mixed feelings about Gemini 3.7 Flash. I used it for a personal project in Java and it was ok: it was crazy fast and it reached the correct result, but the code quality was barely passable. I also used it for a an app for my Garmin watch, and it wasn't good. The code was compiling, but functionality was totally broken and even with a lot of steering it wasn't able to make it work. GLM 5.3-flash instead was up ", "context": "", "use_case": "Garmin app coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber"}, {"id": 792302677, "item_id": 49518917, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518917", "by": "terhechte", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Qwen 3.8 and GLM 5.3 Flash daily", "excerpt": "It is the point. Also open source model enthusiast tell you otherwise, there is a coding quality gap between these models. If I use DeepSeek, I do so knowing that I have to limit to simpler tasks on smaller, well specified prompts. What the author did, letting the model do the planning, is not something DeepSeek will excel at. I'm using GPT (Terra, Sol, Luna), Claude (Opus 5, Fable), Qwen 3.8 and GLM 5.3 Flash daily ", "context": "", "use_case": "coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too"}, {"id": 791706273, "item_id": 49481642, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49481642", "by": "dw_arthur", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Tasks that would normally cost $0.08 on DSV4-Flash have cost me $0.30+ on GLM-5.3-Flash.", "excerpt": "Not in my experience. Tasks that would normally cost $0.08 on DSV4-Flash have cost me $0.30+ on GLM-5.3-Flash. These costs are after Deepseek's recent increase. Also GLM-5.3-Flash is so slow compared to DSV4-Flash. I would be fine with GLM-5.3-Flash if it was cheaper and at the same speed as DSV4. I use DSV4-Flash on Max through Deepseek's API. I have been using GLM-5.3-Flash on High through Openrouter which I though", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.3 is now open-weight"}, {"id": 791696432, "item_id": 49481027, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49481027", "by": "a012", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My second favorite model by now is GLM 5.3 flash which is very capable of day to day task.", "excerpt": "My second favorite model by now is GLM 5.3 flash which is very capable of day to day task. I use it as the main model and GLM 5.3 for task that is more complex", "context": "", "use_case": "day-to-day tasks", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.3 is now open-weight"}, {"id": 791292817, "item_id": 49455801, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49455801", "by": "smartbit", "date": "2026-08-26", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I have both GLM & Gemini in a subscription and see no reason for choosing GLM 5.3 Flash.", "excerpt": "Looking at these numbers IMHO, with Gemini you get the speed what you pay for. Intel Cost lig per ence Task Speed Gemini 3.7 flash 56 0.40 338 GLM 5.3 flash 57 0.09 49 Factor 1 4.4 6.9 I have both GLM & Gemini in a subscription and see no reason for choosing GLM 5.3 Flash. Working with de speed of Gemini 3.7 Flash is such a delight that I accept the hassle of working with Antigravity CLI, coming from Claude Code whic", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "GLM-5.3-Flash Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis"}]}