Comment by simplyluke

I've been using it for a week via opencode in a large, mature codebase for some moderately ambitious feature development, and a bit of debugging. Explicit purpose is evaluating if it may be a good substitute to save money for many tasks. For several tasks I've had both it and opus 4.8 attempt the same task and compared them.

In general, it's comparable across the board. Claude is less "verbose" -- GLM really likes to comment a ton. There were a few things where I think claude would have needed a little bit less back and forth. So opus still has an edge, but it's marginal, very much unlike previous open/competitor models where benchmarks looked good but actual day to day performance was pretty bad. I'm sure fable is "better" but it's so expensive + data retention policies are such that for the moment it was generally available I couldn't use it for work. This is still notably better performance than when claude code took the industry by storm.

I'm understanding why Dario is trying to regulate open weight models away.