GLM 5.2 is the first open weights model I'd call a genuine competitor to Opus and GPT for agentic work - at ~15-20% of the price. Part one of why AI inference margins are about to collapse.
I wouldn’t rec AI tools to a novice, that’s for sure. You can’t really build a good intuition for programming if you don’t go in there and write the programs yourself. the higher-end models can do a lot, but if you don’t understand what the code is doing on your own the result is always going to be slop.
I treat the AI as a pair programming partner that’s reeally good at pattern matching, but has zero comprehension skills. I find this makes the tool way more useful since I’m fighting slop and nonsense way less. the hard part is training yourself to break the programing problem down into small auto-complete steps that a medium strength AI can run with. basically my approach is writing a program or patch in my head and prompting the AI to generate the components.
for hobby coding, this is way more work than just writing the code myself. it only pays off when dealing with large projects. its like an industrial power tool, useful in-context, but you don’t need a hydraulic power-hammer to do a little carpentry.
I wouldn’t rec AI tools to a novice, that’s for sure. You can’t really build a good intuition for programming if you don’t go in there and write the programs yourself. the higher-end models can do a lot, but if you don’t understand what the code is doing on your own the result is always going to be slop.
I treat the AI as a pair programming partner that’s reeally good at pattern matching, but has zero comprehension skills. I find this makes the tool way more useful since I’m fighting slop and nonsense way less. the hard part is training yourself to break the programing problem down into small auto-complete steps that a medium strength AI can run with. basically my approach is writing a program or patch in my head and prompting the AI to generate the components.
for hobby coding, this is way more work than just writing the code myself. it only pays off when dealing with large projects. its like an industrial power tool, useful in-context, but you don’t need a hydraulic power-hammer to do a little carpentry.