SWE-1.7 vs. GLM-5

SWE-1.7 is a frontier software engineering model from Cognition built for advanced coding agents and long-horizon development workflows. It is designed to deliver strong coding intelligence at a fraction of the cost of some leading frontier alternatives, improving the cost-performance balance for real software engineering work. The model is trained from a Kimi K2.7 base and further improved through Cognition’s reinforcement learning pipeline, showing that additional post-training can still produce major capability gains. SWE-1.7 is optimized for tasks such as bug fixing, feature implementation, code migrations, terminal-based workflows, multilingual software engineering, large codebase navigation, and end-to-end validation. It performs especially well on longer asynchronous tasks where an AI agent needs to gather context, inspect files, test hypotheses, make changes, and verify results over an extended period. Cognition trained the model with infrastructure improvements that preserve entropy, stabilize training, support multi-cluster reinforcement learning, and improve fault tolerance across large distributed runs. The training process also focused heavily on data quality, using automated execution tests, verifier quality checks, reward-hacking prevention, and task filtering to create stronger learning signals. SWE-1.7 includes self-compaction, allowing it to summarize its working state and continue long projects even when tasks exceed the raw context window. It also uses an alternating length penalty to encourage concise reasoning on easier tasks while maintaining deeper exploration when a problem requires it. In practice, the model tends to explore codebases carefully, read relevant files, search for hidden requirements, test edge cases, and experiment before deciding how to implement a fix. Available in Devin across web, desktop, and CLI via Cerebras, SWE-1.7 gives engineering teams a powerful model for running scalable, cost-efficient coding agents.

GLM-5 is Z.ai’s most advanced open-source model to date, purpose-built for complex systems engineering, long-horizon planning, and autonomous agent workflows. Building on the foundation of GLM-4.5, it dramatically scales both total parameters and pre-training data while increasing active parameter efficiency. The integration of DeepSeek Sparse Attention allows GLM-5 to maintain strong long-context reasoning capabilities while reducing deployment costs. To improve post-training performance, Z.ai developed slime, an asynchronous reinforcement learning infrastructure that significantly boosts training throughput and iteration speed. As a result, GLM-5 achieves top-tier performance among open-source models across reasoning, coding, and general agent benchmarks. It demonstrates exceptional strength in long-term operational simulations, including leading results on Vending Bench 2, where it manages a year-long simulated business with strong financial outcomes. In coding evaluations such as SWE-bench and Terminal-Bench 2.0, GLM-5 delivers competitive results that narrow the gap with proprietary frontier systems. The model is fully open-sourced under the MIT License and available through Hugging Face, ModelScope, and Z.ai’s developer platforms. Developers can deploy GLM-5 locally using inference frameworks like vLLM and SGLang, including support for non-NVIDIA hardware through optimization and quantization techniques. Through Z.ai, users can access both Chat Mode for fast interactions and Agent Mode for tool-augmented, multi-step task execution. GLM-5 also enables structured document generation, producing ready-to-use .docx, .pdf, and .xlsx files for business and academic workflows. With compatibility across coding agents and cross-application automation frameworks, GLM-5 moves foundation models from conversational assistants toward full-scale work engines.