Depends what you do. Complex tasks, poorly-defined tasks, sure. For relatively simple tasks, though, or very well-defined tasks, it's just as good and usually a lot faster. It also has a more neutral character and is somewhat less adversarial than Opus. (Opus is always "Let me push back on that..." whereas GLM is "sir, yes sir!") I use both and I appreciate both. If Opus disappeared tomorrow, though, I wouldn't cry -- I'd be able to adapt to a GLM-5.2-only life real quick.

I accept that for you and your work this is true.

I have a different experience: for a month I paid big money for Opus and got a lot done. Now I am gorging on GLM 5.2 running on Fireworks.ai and I am also getting a lot done for about 15% of the money.

Everyone should do their own evals on their own work.

On those measures it is better.

That's an opinion many will disagree with. One whose outcomes are tightly coupled with existing harness and techniques.

In my real life usage Opus 4.7 and 4.8 have been increasingly unhelpful compared to 4.6 in behaving as assistants.

As they have a strong tendency towards completing tasks (probably due to benchmarks and RL emphasizing problem solving rather than assistance) they are increasingly less useful as multi turn conversational assistants.

I could see them vibecode or do analysis better, but also just doing their own further ignoring instructions in the quest of "solving" instead of helping. Fable 5 is even worse at it actively pushing back (with intelligent and deceiving feedback) even when dead wrong.

GLM seems to suffer less of this.