The author's test reached a conclusion opposite to most community sentiment: LongCat 2.0's games were "playable but rough and buggy" (one build even showed a completely black screen), while GLM 5.2's outputs on the same tasks were "cleaner, smoother, and more polished." His recommendation was "worth playing with, not worth switching to" — a negative independent sample that should be read alongside positive evidence about LongCat 2.0.
LongCat 2.0 was asked to build several game demos: Dragon Realm, a Skyrim-style open world, and VoxelCraft. The conclusion was "playable, but buggy and rough — one build even went completely black at certain points."
The same game-building tasks were run with GLM 5.2 (a crypt game, Dragon Realm, a Skyrim-style world, and VoxelCraft): every GLM 5.2 version was cleaner, smoother, and more polished; "LongCat's VoxelCraft in particular was not in the same league. In every side-by-side comparison, GLM 5.2 won."
Official API experience: The official API section "looked broken," and topping up appeared to require China-specific settings, so the author switched to testing through the website chat.
"It's a genuinely cool, free, open-source release, and Meituan deserves credit for launching a serious model from outside the usual AI labs. But if I had to choose one open-source Chinese model to actually build with today, I would still choose GLM 5.2 — it's the strongest open-source option I've tested. LongCat 2.0 is worth playing with, not worth switching to."
Background information: The author confirmed that LongCat 2.0 is the model behind the free API "AoAlpha" (Owl Alpha); it has 1.6T parameters; it was trained entirely on Meituan's own chips, with zero Nvidia; and it comes with LSA, zero-compute experts, and MIPD (as written in the original; it should be MOPD).
Conflict-of-interest warning: The author earns a living selling AI Profit Boardroom subscriptions (the article repeatedly directs readers to join the community), so it is also marketing content. His conclusion that "GLM 5.2 is stronger" is directionally consistent with other evidence (AlphaSignal reports GLM-5.2 SWE-bench Pro 62.1 > LongCat 59.5, review 04), but the claim that LongCat's game builds are rough conflicts with positive official/community demos (prompt directories 07/08, review 09). This indicates high variance in these tasks, with results dependent on prompts and tiers.
The prompts, tiers, and reproduction links were not disclosed. Based only on the textual description, the outputs cannot be checked at the artifact level; the date field is anomalous and the publication timing is uncertain.
Task applicability: If this article is taken on its own terms, LongCat 2.0 is not suitable for creative coding tasks that demand high output completeness; if the official and r/opencodeCLI evidence is used, it is suitable. Overall: LongCat 2.0 has high variance on creative coding tasks, so run a small test first.
LongCat 2.0
