GLM

As the capability gap between open and closed AI models shrinks, the GLM model family by Z.ai stands out for its performance on software engineering workloads. Using a roughly 700-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, models such as GLM-5.3 achieve strong benchmark results in coding, reasoning and agentic tasks, driven largely by specialized post-training rather than pretraining scale alone. This makes GLM-5.3 one of the best open-weight models currently available for coding and software engineering.

We like GLM because it provides teams with an open-weight alternative that competes with proprietary frontier models and complex reasoning tasks. However, in our experience, the model can sometimes "think" too much, overanalyzing straightforward prompts. We advise teams to configure the reasoning effort based on the complexity of the workload.