Overview
This weeks' model spotlight is GLM 4.5 Air. This is one of my all-time favorite models, and I'll get into why in a second but first let's start with the specs.
Specs
GLM 4.5 Air is a 106B model. I have tested it at various precisions and recommend running it at 8bit, which means you can run it on a Mac Studio with 256GB Unified Memory. There is enough memory overhead to run a smaller model in tandem, like Gemma 4 26B A4B.
Strengths
GLM 4.5 is comparable to Sonnet 4.5 in benchmarks and after real world testing, it lives up to the hype. I've been incredibly impressed by this model. It's core strengths are:
- Agent - proficient with tool calling and agentic harnesses
- Reasoning - Very intelligent model and combined with Brave for web search it's a strong general chat assistant
- Planning - Trained to plan and exceptional at navigating/understanding codebases.
- FAST - It's a MoE model, which means only 12B parameters activate per token. It is crazy fast at inference time despite having the benefits of a much larger model
Limitations
While I love this model for many use cases, there are some limitations. The largest is that it isn't an omni model which means it can only process text inputs. No audio, images, or video. Pair with with a model like Qwen3.5 or Gemma 4 though on your Mac Studio and you can compensate for this.
Another limitation is that while it's trained on code, code comprehension, codebase navigation, and planning it's not necessarily trained to write code. For agentic coding, I recommend using GLM 4.5 Air for planning and Qwen3 Coder Next 80B for implementation.
My Experiences
Coding Assistant
I used GLM 4.5 Air in OpenCode as a planning agent and I was blown away at how well it did at navigating, comprehending, and planning within my codebase.
I paired it with Qwen3 Coder Next to implement the plans and it's the strongest open source coding stack I've used yet. All of this can run on a single Mac Studio.
Agentic Assistant
I've been using Meebly a LOT lately. It's one of my all-time favorite platforms for building AI Agents. I've now setup 3 agents in Meebly using GLM 4.5 Air and I'm blown away by the performance.
Highlight Production Use Case: Support Agent
I setup a support agent for a client in their website using Meebly and GLM 4.5 Air and they LOVE it. GLM successfully chats with users in their website, answers questions from the docs using RAG and tool calls to pull FAQ docs, and pulls user data from support endpoints. I'm very impressed with this production use case for GLM 4.5 Air.
Final Thoughts
This is one of my favorite models and works for a lot of different use cases. The fact that it fits on a single Mac Studio makes it viable for a lot of business use cases.