My whole point is that I don't want it to build an entire feature from one prompt. At most, I want to work with an agent to nail down the spec and then work with an agent that orchestrates the implementation via other agents, same for testing, etc. None of that requires frontier capabilities, it requires a little bit of work on a harness, a little bit more of my input, a little more of my brainpower. I _want_ to build tools that make it work better and don't change when the CC team gins up some default for their harness and foists it on me. I don't see that as a tradeoff at all and I think engaging in my work process more than fire and forget (and literally always in my experience fix stuff later) is more fun and rewarding once the 'holy shit this is now possible' high wears off. Doubly so once the frontier model gets nerfed mid-cycle and now I have to undo the mess because they released v*.x++ and I fell for it again by trusting it to do these agentic tasks without my involvement.

I don't know about you guys, but half of the time I give Opus something actually complicated, it spends 50+ minutes trying to understand the problem, running lots of searches and tool calls, and then gives up and just writes a brief summary of what it thought about. Biggest waste of tokens you can imagine.

I would say 3.5 flash is great if you use a good open harness. I use omp for that. The thing with Google is that they announce they have a great model, and that they have been testing it internally for half a year. I guess they don't care too much about who or how he uses it.

I am still struggling how to deal with sub agents and different roles for each model. I still think Claude or Codex are overall better models, but everything around them transpires such weird vibes, including, and this one kills me, that at certain times they feel like dumbed down.

I keep changing these things often, but I have basic subscription to codex (20$ plan) which I use with GLM 5.2 to do some high level planning of what I intend to do, and then leave Deepseek do the coding. Or something along those lines.

Point is, GLM 5.2 is now at a point where I cannot tell you if it's better or worse. I can tell you however one thing: no matter when I use it, it's consistent in what it does and how it works.

Then there is the Fable thing, but as with many things, I think the past has distorted the reality. It lasted two days, but Anthropic said it clearly for plan users it would only be there for two weeks. It was great for doing what you can already do with other tools: doing all the planning, and reviews, and launching a million subagents talking to each other. I sometimes wonder if it was really a new model, or just Opus 4.9 wrapped with some fancy model driven harness.

> With Opus you can give it a long-horizon task (eg build an entire feature) and it will plan it out and implement it and almost always stay on task. This is what people mean when they say "agentic tasks"

I've had no trouble getting the current generation of smaller models to do the same thing. Maybe it's more of a harness issue than a model issue?

Recently I've used both MiniMax M3 and DeepSeek V4 Flash to one-shot moderately complex applications from a written spec, and neither one got lost along the way

> 3.5 Flash is supposed to address this, but I haven't had a good reason to try it.

Price and speed, for me. GLM5.2 is "good enough" for some tasks, but rather slow (on their coding plan). In the time it takes GLM to "read files to figure out...", gemini flash is usually finished. It's not SotA for coding, but it's fast and often "good enough" for normal tasks.