I also use Claude premium daily for another client, and i use Codex. and i can tell you that GLM5 is at this point much more capable than Claude and Codex for complex backend end work, complex feature planning, and long horizon tasks. One thing i've noticed is that it is particularly good at following instructions and guidelines, even deep into the execution of a plan.
To me the only problem is that z.ai have had trouble with inference : the performance of their API has been pretty poor at times. It looks like this is an hardware issue related to the Huawei chips they use rather than an issue with the model itself. The situation has been substantially improving over the past few weeks.
GLM5.1, GLM5-Turbo and GLM5v are at this point better than Opus, Codex, Gemini and other claude source models. We have reached a major turning point. To me, the only closed source model still in the game is codex as it is much faster at executing simple tasks and implementing already created plans.
Try GLM5v for your PDF work, it's their last generation vision model that has been released a couple of days ago.