Verdict: GLM-5. 3-Flash wins for agentic coding, DeepSeek V4 Flash wins on price, and MiniCPM5-2B wins on-device. The best open-source LLM for coding in September 2026 depends on where the work runs, and the split is now clean.
Source: [Dev.to](https://dev.to/shaam_ai/glm-53-flash-vs-qwen38-flash-next-vs-deepseek-v4-flash-56fe)