> If you were to take away my work's $500 budget for Opus 5.5 and replace it with unlimited use of GLM-5.3, it would be a huge downgrade in my opinion.

I am perfectly able to do the tasks with own custom harness and unlimited local Qwen 3.8 27B with 150t/s. Harness needs search capability and more fine-tuning for the job.

You need less words to describe the intent with Astra/Opus 5.5, and it automatically usually observes the best practice that you don't need to explicitly tell, but with only a slight more effort you can get the job done. I have even made security audits with Qwen 3.8 27B against projects fully written with Claude Opus and it is a bit mind-boggling, but there have been tens of vulnerabilities, identified by this model alone. This excludes the issues found when guiding more myself.