One month coding with GLM 5.3 Flash

4 hours ago (wagtail.org)

It was a bit of a silly challenge, wasn’t sure how workable, learned a lot in the process about what actually drives usage / costs, and how to keep both under control

  • Considering they were your top two models, how did the flash and non-flash versions compare? Did you use them for different tasks?

Flash is pretty decent coder, but it should be paired with good planner and reviewer. I would pick astra low for planning and sol 6.1 medium for reviews.

  • What would you use if you wanted to stay (at least) open weight?

    • qwen3.8, kimi3, kimi2.7, GLM-5.3 are all good families I use in my coding team

      I'm mainly using flash varients, at least as the default, bump.up to stronger model as needed (less often these days)

  • 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 (from z.ai).