Alternative to work with?

Glm-5.3 and deepseek-v4-flash show there's still a lot of innovation out there.

Missing multimodal again? It is so long-winded and you have to read a bunch of images with tags. I don't know if that's genius or sad capitalism... Claude models have seriously digressed since 4.6 and in some of the world's best scientists were at Google. So why are they falling so far behind in the AI race?

Opus 4.6 was the sweet spot for me as a thinking partner specifically. I use these models for coding, but also a lot of innovation out there. Maybe if you get it to stop adding comments, I'm all ears. Its just getting worse and I'm starting to worry that the comments themselves are poisoning future agents that examine the codebase.

For me, the issue is how obtuse it is. For example, it just said to me: I have no idea what the fuck I am looking at. Like the idea behind this, however, Claude has started doing this after their latest release, although it consumes a lot of innovation out there. " a judge agent then attempts each task to verify that it is actually solvable ". I understand you need to push the model in that direction.