Building an internal email marketing tool with claude code + glm-5.1 and they have completely different personalities
Been building an email marketing tool for our company, mostly api work with sonnet 4.6 wired in for the automation side. Used both claude code and glm-5.1 through the whole process and the difference in how they behave is kind of funny.
Claude code is great but man you have to handle it carefully. Even in ask-permission mode it sometimes just goes ahead and executes stuff I didn't approve yet. Its like dealing with someone who half-listens, you have to be really specific and most coax it into doing exactly what you want or it runs off and does its own thing. When you get the prompt right in the output is excellent but getting there takes patience.
glm-5.1 is the opposite in a good way. It doesn't make me babysit the prompt as much. I threw it backend tasks and it just built like 60% of the structure on its own without me spelling everything out. It even got creative with the frontend, gave me a clean looking ui on a section where I didn't ask for any ask for any design at all, just functionality. Didn't expect that.
But glm-5.1 is slow. Like noticeably, same prompt where claude gives me a result in 30 seconds, glm takes closer to 60. When you're iterating fast that lag adds up and gets annoying. The tradeoff is the glm output is usually better quality when it finally lands so I guess pick your poison.
Neither is perfect. Claude needs hand holding on permissions and glm makes you wait. But using them together covered the gaps for this project.
Posted Jun 2, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC