Starting with GLM-5.3 Flash was a pretty decent first try! I started with other models, and ended up settling on this exact one because all the others were either too slow or unreliable for my tasks. Qwen 3.8 didn't do it for me, whatever tweaks I added to my harness. Where I'm getting at is you did start with an incredible model in the first place, which greatly helps sticking to it.
GLM-5.3 Flash has been my goto since it came out. Only failed once when it lost context, but I'm assuming that was my fault rather than the model. If models never make it past today's close-to-frontier for the rest of my life, I wouldn't complain.
