GLM-5.2 vs Gemma-4 12B Coder

What I tested — same prompt, two models

I run the same fixed prompt set through every new model the day it drops — same string, one shot, single HTML file out — and I score the result 0–10 on whether it ran, how close it hit the brief, and how good it looked. Below is what came out when I gave the exact same prompts to GLM-5.2 and Gemma-4 12B Coder, side by side, on 5 shared tasks inside the Agent Operating System.

Both models were given identical prompts inside the Agent Operating System — no help, no iteration, no "best of N" tricks. I run each prompt once, save the HTML file the model produces, and score it 0–10 on whether it ran, how close it hit the brief, and how good it looked. The scoring is mine. The verdicts below are pulled from my source comparison guides at agentos.guide where I publish every score and the reasoning behind it.

GLM-5.2 · Default model inside Agent OS for any task that touches a long context — codebase Q&A, multi-file refactors, agent memory replay.

Gemma-4 12B Coder · Wired into the Agent OS local engine (Local chat + Local Hermes Engine + Agent Kanban) as the free, offline coder. Scored by Claude judge against the same one-shot prompts every other model ran.

Where GLM-5.2 beat Gemma-4 12B Coder

The tasks where I gave GLM-5.2 a higher 0–10 score on the same prompt — with the actual commentary from my source guides.

Strengths & weaknesses I logged

Pricing & context — the spec sheet

The verdict — which should you pick?

Across 4 scored shared tasks, GLM-5.2 averaged 8.38/10, beating Gemma-4 12B Coder's 5.12/10 by 3.25 points. Pick GLM-5.2 when the build has to ship on the first prompt and you can afford the trade-offs in the comparison below.

If you only run one of these inside your stack, the head-to-head average above is the call. If you can run both, my honest play is to wire GLM-5.2 and Gemma-4 12B Coder both into the Agent Operating System and dispatch each from the kanban by task type — long-context agent loops — pasting a whole codebase into one prompt → GLM-5.2, free, private, offline coding where nothing can leave your machine → Gemma-4 12B Coder. That's the same setup I run for the 3,600+ founders inside the AI Profit Boardroom.

FAQ — GLM-5.2 vs Gemma-4 12B Coder

Which is better, GLM-5.2 or Gemma-4 12B Coder?

On Goldie Bench, GLM-5.2 averages 8.38/10 across the shared tasks, with 5 gold, 1 silver, 2 bronze overall. Gemma-4 12B Coder averages 5.12/10, with 0 gold, 0 silver, 0 bronze. GLM-5.2 wins the head-to-head 4–0.

How much does GLM-5.2 cost vs Gemma-4 12B Coder?

GLM-5.2: Open-weights release: weights downloadable from Hugging Face for self-hosting, or runnable for free on z.ai for individuals (commercial use has separate licensing). Gemma-4 12B Coder: A community fine-tune of Google's Gemma-4 12B (xentriom/gemma-4-12B-coder-fable5-composer2.5-v1), Apache-2.0. Free to download and run 100% offline on your own Mac via Ollama — no API, no per-token bill. The Q4_K_M build is 7.4GB.

What's the context window for GLM-5.2 vs Gemma-4 12B Coder?

GLM-5.2 has a 1,000,000 tokens context window. Gemma-4 12B Coder has a 256,000 tokens context window.

When should I pick GLM-5.2 over Gemma-4 12B Coder?

Pick GLM-5.2 for: Long-context agent loops — pasting a whole codebase into one prompt; Cinematic visual builds — landing pages, voxel scenes, synthwave runners; Anyone who needs to run a frontier coder locally for $0. The trade-off is the weaknesses we logged on the bench: Faceplanted on the {{SITE_NAME}} raycaster — the engine was great but it spawned the player inside a wall; First-shot reliability lags Opus by a hair on consistency.

When should I pick Gemma-4 12B Coder over GLM-5.2?

Pick Gemma-4 12B Coder for: Free, private, offline coding where nothing can leave your machine; Landing pages, simple canvas builds, and code you'll review before shipping; Anyone who wants a $0 local coder wired into their Agent OS. The trade-off is the weaknesses we logged on the bench: Half its one-shots shipped broken on the bench — a missing canvas append, a missing render loop, and an uncompiled WebGL shader; Far below frontier models on complex 3D / WebGL / games — strongest on pages and simple canvas work, not simulations.

How does Goldie Bench score GLM-5.2 vs Gemma-4 12B Coder?

Every demo on this page was built by Julian Goldie inside the Agent Operating System — same fixed prompt for both models, one shot, single HTML file out. Each result gets a 0–10 score on whether it ran, how close it hit the brief, and how good it looked. The highest score on each task gets gold; second gets silver; third gets bronze. See methodology for full provenance.

Related comparisons

Other head-to-heads using the same scoring system:

Full model pages: GLM-5.2 · Gemma-4 12B Coder · back to the leaderboard