# GLM-4.5 Air

9 Hacker News commenters recommended GLM-4.5 Air and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free open-weight model that people run locally and rate highly for coding and general use. Some report weaker performance on certain tasks.

## Why people recommend it

- Runs locally and fits on hardware (3 comments): "I've gotten great results out of glm-4.5-air which is 4.5 distilled down to 110B params which can fit nicely at 8 bits" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361668)) "you can also run something like GPT OSS 120B or GLM 4.5 Air locally." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46521953)) "both easily fit and run incredibly fast" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46363693))
- Good results across tasks, including coding (3 comments): "I limit myself to models with <144B params, then it's quite an enjoyable experience. GLM 4.5 Air has been great in particular" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46112105)) "I've gotten great results out of glm-4.5-air which is 4.5 distilled down to 110B params which can fit nicely at 8 bits" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361668)) "is fantastic all around (including coding)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45877951))

## What people warn about

- Performance drops on some tasks (2 comments): "it delegates certain tasks to glm-4.5 air and that drops performance a ton" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46362615)) "the community darling GLM-4.5-Air got 50%" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46462509))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Qwen 3.8 27B](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen-3-8-27b.md): 1173 recommend
- [Z.ai GLM](https://hackerapproved.com/p/glm-5-2.md): 1043 recommend
- [Kimi](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kimi-k3.md): 931 recommend
- [Gemma 4](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemma-4.md): 713 recommend
- [Qwen](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen.md): 474 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "GLM-4.5 Air", https://hackerapproved.com/p/glm-4-5-air/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).