If you use a good harness or add the right tools and plugins both the image and web search issues mentioned are non-issues. oh-my-pi (omp.sh) handles images fo

If you use a good harness or add the right tools and plugins both the image and web search issues mentioned are non-issues. oh-my-pi (omp.sh) handles images for text models out of the box - as long as you have any vision capable provider enabled, it will be used when you paste images to a text model. Rather than let it guess I configured it to use MiniMax M3 for this task (as well as other utility tasks like code exploration & library functions). opencode has plugins that do the same thing, but I haven't used it since picking up omp and haven't tried them. In open harnesses you can also configure your search provider(s) separately from the model provider - if you've got a ChatGPT sub you can use just their websearch for example. I've been using Kagi's API and found its cheap enough not to matter to me at all. As for slowness, I'm not sure I'm really seeing that in terms of wall clock time. The author says GLM uses more tokens for reasoning but doesn't explain how they know that - frontier models don't provide nearly the entire reasoning trace. I have the suspicion that the author is not aware of that fact. I use Opus with Claude Code for work and I find it subjectively slower because I can't read its CoT trace. That is another HUGE benefit of GLM: I can't tell you how many times I've seen it start to go sideways in its CoT - usually due to something I didn't tell it - and I just stop it and give a course correction rather than wait a whole turn. Overall I agree with the takes from the article and frankly its sad how much cope I see on Twitter (and even here) from people that think AI coding is busted once subscription subsidies are dropped. GLM is already good enough and cheap enough to use it at API rates - but it is MUCH more expensive than other open models that are also very nearly good enough. In twelve months I'm confident you'll be able to get equivalent results at API rates for less than $1 per million output tokens, and more likely that will happen in six months. Deepseek v4 Pro is already almost there (and at only $0.85/MM) - and at least on benchmarks its already better than GLM 5.1 which I was happily using quite a lot before 5.2 dropped. I haven't tried Deepseek since I already have a z.ai pro sub that I locked in for $30 - at $72 its a lot less compelling.