Discussion
bigyabai: It's an okay model. My biggest issue using GLM 5.1 in OpenCode is that it loses coherency over longer contexts. When you crest 128k tokens, there's a high chance that the model will start spouting gibberish until you compact the history.For short-term bugfixing and tweaks though, it does about what I'd expect from Sonnet for a pretty low price.
embedding-shape: > It's an okay model. My biggest issue using GLM 5.1 in OpenCode is that it loses coherency over longer contextsSince 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?
dang: [stub for offtopicness][[you guys, please don't post like this to HN - it will just irritate the community and get you flamed]]
smith7018: Hmm, three spam comments posted within 9 minutes of each other. The accounts were created 15 minutes ago, 51 days ago, and 3 months ago.Interesting.Hopefully these aren't bots created by Z.AI because GLM doesn't need fake engagement.
dang: These comments are probably either by friends of the OP or perhaps associated with the project somehow, which is against HN's rules but not the kind of attack we're mostly concerned with these days. Old-fashioned voting rings and booster comments aren't existential threats and actually bring up somewhat nostalgic feelings at the moment!Thanks for watching out for the quality of HN...
tadfisher: I moderate a medium-sized development subreddit. The sheer volume of spam advertising some AI SaaS company has skyrocketed over the past few months, like 10000%. Comment spam is now a service you can purchase [0][1], and I would not be surprised if Z.ai engaged some marketing firm which ended up purchasing this service.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...
wolttam: long(er) contexts (than the previous model)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
RickHull: I am on their "Coding Lite" plan, which I got a lot of use out of for a few months, but it has been seriously gimped now. Obvious quantization issues, going in circles, flipping from X to !X, injecting chinese characters. It is useless now for any serious coding work.
kay_o: I am on the mid tier Coding plan to trying it out for the sake of curiosity.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
jauntywundrkind: Chiming in to second this issue. It is wildly frustrating.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.
azuanrb: Have you compared it with using Claude Code as the harness? It performs much better than opencode for me.
Mashimo: I'm also on the lite plan and have been using 5.1 for a few days now. It works fine for me.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.
wolttam: This is surprising to me. Maybe because I'm on Pro, and not Lite. I signed up last week and managed to get a ton of good work done with 5.1. I think I did run into the odd quantization quirk, but overall: $30 well spent
satvikpendem: Every model seems that way, going back to even GPT 3 and 4, the company comes out with a very impressive model that then regresses over a few months as the company tries to rein in inference costs through quantization and other methods.
margorczynski: It has been useless for long time when compared to Opus or even something like Kimi. The saving grace was that it was dirt cheap but that doesn't matter if it can't do what I want even after many repeated tries and trying to push it to a correct solution.
alex7o: To be honest I am a bit sad as, glm5.1 is producing mich better typescript than opus or codex imo, but no matter what it does sometimes go into shizo mode at some point over longer contexts. Not always tho I have had multiple session go over 200k and be fine.
MegagramEnjoyer: Why is that sad? A free and open source model outperforming their closed source counterparts is always a win for the users
unicornfinder: I'm on their pro plan and I respectfully disagree - it's genuinely excellent with GLM 5.1 so long as you remember to /compact once it hits around 100k tokens. At that point it's pretty much broken and entirely unusable, but if you keep context under about 100k it's genuinely on par with Opus for me, and in some ways it's arguably better.
airstrike: [delayed]
esseph: [delayed]
kay_o: Is manual compation absolutely mandatory ?
disiplus: When it works and its not slow it can impress. Like yesterday it solved something that kimi k2.5 could not. and kimi was best open source model for me. But it still slow sometimes. I have z.ai and kimi subscription when i run out of tokens for claude (max) and codex(plus).i have a feeling its nearing opus 4.5 level if they could fix it getting crazy after like 100k tokens.
Yukonv: Unsloth quantizations are available on release as well. [0] The IQ4_XS is a massive 361 GB with the 754B parameters. This is definitely a model your average local LLM enthusiast is not going to be able to run even with high end hardware.[0] https://huggingface.co/unsloth/GLM-5.1-GGUF
zozbot234: SSD offload is always a possibility with good software support. Of course you might easily object that the model would not be "running" then, more like crawling. Still you'd be able to execute it locally and get it to respond after some time.
DeathArrow: After the context gets to 100k tokens you should open a new session or run /compact.
LaurensBER: I'm on their lite plan as well and I've been using it for my OpenClaw. It had some issues but it also one-shotted a very impressive dashboard for my Twitter bookmarks.For the price this is a pretty damn impressive model.
gavinray: I find the "8 hour Linux Desktop" bit disingenuous, in the fine print it's a browser page: > "build a Linux-style desktop environment as a web application" They claim "50 applications from scratch", but "Browser" and a bunch of the other apps are likely all <iframe> elements.We all know that building a spec-compliant browser alone is a herculean task.
winterqt: Comments here seem to be talking like they've used this model for longer than a few hours -- is this true, or are y'all just sharing your initial thoughts?
operatingthetan: The context windows of these Chinese open-source subscriptions (GLM, Minimax, Kimi) is too small and I'm guessing it's because they are trying to keep them cheap to run. Fine for openclaw, not so much for coding.
jaggs: How does it compare to Kimi 2.5 or Qwen 3.6 Plus?
BeetleB: It's been out for a while.
cmrdporcupine: I honestly still hold onto habits from earlier days of Claude & Codex usage and tend to wipe / compact my context frequently. I don't trust the era of big giant contexts, frankly, even on the frontier models.
greenavocado: Z.ai Discord is filled to the brim with people experiencing capacity issues. I had to cancel my subscription with Z.ai because the service was totally unusable. Their Discord is a graveyard of failures. I switched to Alibaba Cloud for GLM but now they hiked their coding plan to $50 a month which is 2.5x more expensive than ChatGPT Plus. Totally insane.
sourcecodeplz: Everyone has started either hiking their prices or limiting the tokens, gravy train is over. Glad we have open models that we can host; Sad RAM is so expensive..
braebo: The cost per message increases with context while quality decreases so it’s still generally good to practice strategic context engineering. Even with cross-repo changes on enterprise systems, it’s uncommon to need more than 100k (unless I’m using playwright mcp for testing).
tgtweak: Share the harness for that browser linux OS task :)
thawab: Don’t want to disappoint you, but above 200k opus memory is like a gold fish. You need to be below 150k to get good research and implementation.
arcanemachiner: Oh nice, I just wrote pretty much the same comment above yours.
arcanemachiner: Personal opinions follow:Claude Opus at 150K context starts getting dumber and dumber.Claude Opus at 200K+ is mentally retarded. Abandon hope and start wrapping up the session.
