# Z.ai GLM 1043 Hacker News commenters recommended Z.ai GLM and 384 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.17 years (52 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** An open-weight coding model close to frontier quality at a fraction of the cost, though critics cite slow, outage-prone hosting, erratic output and expensive self-hosting hardware. ## Why people recommend it - Far cheaper than Claude or GPT (8 comments): "other providers can offer third-party open source models with roughly the similar quality like this, Kimi K2.6 or GLM 5.1 for 10 times less the price" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47886511)) "I would constitute that even by using GLM 5.2 as you are originally doing even with API costs is probably much more sustainable over long run" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739620)) "I have been using a quorum composed of step-3.5-flash, Kimi k2.5 and glm-5 and I have found it outperforms opus-4.5 at a fraction of the cost" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088651)) - Close to frontier model quality (6 comments): "several Chinese models (at least Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM) are "close enough" that with the right harness they are cost effective alternatives" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48390313)) "the fact that they've got an open model that is just a smidge less capable than the multibillion dollar state of the art models is fantastic" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359591)) "it was better than corporate's fave Sonnet 4.8 and a but worse than Opus 4.8. overall quite capable of a lot of what the dev team needed." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49051374)) - Open weights you can self-host (5 comments): "The point isn't that the models are from China. It's that the weights are open. You can download the weights and finetune them yourself." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46977266)) "The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose) and glm (coding) and they are both open weight and share lots of their tooling." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514532)) "the obvious practical solution to the lack of frontier models in cyberdefense is that the defenders should run GLM 5.3 themselves" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49901203)) - Strong at coding and security (5 comments): "GLM 5.2 was used by Hugging Face for defense when they were being hacked by OpenAI because the guardrails on closed models meant they refused to help." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49901749)) "I've found GLM 5.2 to be better at security research than Opus 4.6 [4]. But it's a quirky model that degrades quickly at long context lengths." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045215)) "The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose) and glm (coding) and they are both open weight and share lots of their tooling." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514532)) ## What people warn about - Self-hosting needs very expensive hardware (4 comments): "GLM 5.3 a lot trickier because if you don't want to have a model that is quantized too far down that is a fortune in VRAM and GPUs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49901726)) "Other than the top performers (e.g. GLM 5.1, Kimi K2.5, where required hardware is basically unaffordable for a single person)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47808331)) "Models in the 700B+ category (GLM5, Kimi K2.5) are decent, but running those on your own hardware is a six-figure investment." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230303)) - Slow inference and capacity outages (4 comments): "anyone remotely considering that subscription should go on reddit and see all the people experiencing outages constantly and insanely slow speeds" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707569)) "Not remotely usable interactively, but something I could plausibly push a codebase into and come back to a review in a couple of days." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49295989)) "GLM and Kimi models are "thinkslop" models that reason over their own thinking, which increases cost and decreases speed significantly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49305561)) - Erratic or unreliable output (5 comments): "which was more like the ravings of a lunatic - but lo and behold, after much confusion and a dizzying number of eureka moments the task was completed very successfully" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48666430)) "A friend had GLM 5.2 suddenly become dumb for hours. It started forgetting instructions, randomly inserted some bits in simplified chinese" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056411)) "GLM 5.3 knows that its implementation violates user requirements yet sticks with it after imagining what a hypothetical grader will check" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49851368)) - Thinking tokens inflate real costs (3 comments): "GLM 5.3 was more expensive than Haiku and Sonnet 5.5 on a workload I was testing recently despite being much cheaper on the price sheet" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50191795)) "GLM and Kimi models are "thinkslop" models that reason over their own thinking, which increases cost and decreases speed significantly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49305561)) "I have a hard time justifying GLM 5.3 these days. It's slightly better than Flash but rarely enough to justify the much steeper price." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937643)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Qwen 3.8 27B](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen-3-8-27b.md): 1173 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 - [Qwen3.6-35B-A3B](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen3-6-35b-a3b.md): 373 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://chat.z.ai/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Z.ai GLM", https://hackerapproved.com/p/glm-5-2/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).