[2ndorderthought]

A lot of people are having good experiences doing things like using opus for designing and using locally hosted qwen3.6 for implementation.

I could see a serious cost reduction story by using opus for design and deepseek for implementation.

Personally I would avoid anthropic entirely. But I get why people don't.

[girvo]

Like me: that’s what I do. Either Opus 4.7 or GLM 5.1 for planning, write it out to a markdown file, then farm it out to Qwen 3.6 27B on my DGX Spark-alike using Pi. Works amusingly well all things considered.

[brianjking]

How are you interacting with GLM 5.1? Via the Claude Code harness? I really wish they'd release a fully multimodal model already.

[girvo]

Through Pi, mostly! Also my own for-fun agent I wrote

Yeah so would I, I do miss having vision tools sadly.

[2ndorderthought]

How is glm 5.1? I have t tried it yet but have been meaning too

[girvo]

It's surprisingly good. Beats MiniMax 2.7 and Qwen 3.5 Plus in my testing (I haven't tested 3.6 plus though), quite handily. It's far better than Sonnet, and often equivalent to Opus for the web development and OCaml tasks I'm using it for. It definitely isn't Opus 4.7, but its far good enough to earn it's keep and is substantially cheaper.

[sshine]

I agree with this. And also: it uses more thinking time to reach this. So while you get a lot of tokens on their plan, the peak 3x token usage multiplier + the extra thinking means you run into the rate limit anyways.

[girvo]

True, though the $20 equivalent used for planning only I don’t hit those limits often, vs Claude where the Pro can literally hit limits with a single prompt haha

[amunozo]

Did you compare it with Kimi K2.6 and DeepSeek V4 Pro? I feel they're similar but as GLM is more expensive, I am not using it much.

[Alifatisk]

I second this, glm-5.1 is incredible.

[aftbit]

What hardware are you using to power this?

[girvo]

> DGX Spark-alike

Probably wasn't clear enough if you don't know what that is already, apologies

It's an Asus Ascent GX10, which is a little mini PC with 128GB of LPDDR5X as shared memory for an Nvidia GB10 "Blackwell" (kind of, it's a long story) GPU and a MediaTek ARM CPU

[aftbit]

Ah yeah I saw that, I was just curious which particular mini-PC you were using. I was considering picking up one of the various AI Max 395 boxes before the RAMpocalypse but didn't take the plunge. Thanks for the response!

[girvo]

I heavily considered one of the AMD Strix Halo boxes, but part of the reason I wanted this was to learn CUDA :)

[sterlind]

pulls up chair

could you tell me the long story?

edit: or wait, is it quasi-Blackwell the way all DGX Sparks are quasi-Blackwell? like the actual silicon is different but it's sorta Blackwell-shaped?

[girvo]

Yeah exactly. Shader model 121 is different to SM 120 (consumer Blackwell) and is different again to data centre Blackwell SM100.

The promise of this chip was “write your code locally, then deploy to the same architecture in the data centre!”

Which is nonsense, because the GB10 is better described as “Hopper with Blackwell characteristics” IMO.

Still great hardware, especially for the price and learning. But we are only just starting to get the kernels written to take advantage of it, and mma.sync is sad compared to tcgen05