It's impressive all these companies are getting away with "base usage allowance included" [1] or "standard limits" [2], layering the higher plans as a multiplier of that "base" but never disclosing what it is.
I guess the base is whatever the profit margin needs to be this month.
Now, if only we can figure out what all the others are providing as part of their subscriptions we can compare. (Though 3 million tokens of the top model per day seems kinda low. But, I guess that's what the 5x plan is for. I'd still like to be able to compare against all the big providers.)
I'm somewhat surprised that this is not open source (from what I can tell). Compare to Mimo Code https://github.com/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-Code (which is a CLI, while this is a desktop app).
I don't even know what I would do with a desktop app. I'm running these things in headless VMs, so I can run them with `--dangerously-skip-permissions` or whatever. I don't trust them, even without that flag, on my desktop/laptop.
a well-design IDE should abstract that away, i.e. run the agent in the headless VMs while give you an abstraction that you would feel like you are running the agent locally with all the benefits (editor, browser, diffs, debugger, etc)
But, it's still running on my desktop/laptop. I don't trust them to run on my machine. But, I guess I could run one VM with a desktop to contain the desktop app. Or, just keep using CLI agents.
For local tasks you can only give agents delegated that execute your deterministic read or write on an allowed set of files(e.g pi does this) and execute rights only on containers with no network access. That should get you 95% unblocked for most tasks you want to do with an LLM pretty safely.
You can do a brainstorming with web on a remote container prototyping based on that brainstorm on another container with no network access.
The one thing that is less trustworthy is using local agents for service management, you definitely want to have them scoped to dev/testing. I would never trust an agent to execute any command in production or sensitive data at all
Is the trust concern for the agent running in any form on your machine? Like in a VM on your machine as well or do you mean on the host itself?
I have read about people giving an agent full access to their main system saying they have nothing of value. To me, that's a strange opinion to have with the distinction between what's private and what's secret.
I don't run agents directly on my desktop/laptop machine. I run them in VMs or containers (sometimes in containers on VMs). There have been too many credentials stealing exploits via prompt injection and the like for me to be willing to let an agent roam around on my personal system.
I've also started creating new github deploy keys for each repo in use on a VM, so the blast area for any given agent disaster is "a couple/few github repos and whatever credentials were needed for the agent/model".
I wouldn't let a coworker, even one I know pretty well, log into my personal account on my machines...why would I let an agent that can be tricked into uploading all my credentials to an attackers web server?
The agents have sandboxes, but those are loose. Not enforced by anything outside of the agent harness itself.
Oh yeah, that sounds wise to me. Some people don't run the agents on a VM on their own machine and opt for a VPS somewhere. And I was wondering if privacy and security had anything to do with their decision.
I'm working on a credential broker that would keep credentials vaulted and parcel out access on a per-grant basis. Is that something you'd find useful or is your setup comprehensive enough? We would be allowing people to draft access policies with natural language, I figured it would be useful for things like vercel, stripe access etc.
They might be sending some user requests to Anthropic to gather trading data for their own models. If they do so, perhaps they need to add some tracer to request that they prefer to hide.
The request would need to be done from their service, so as not to expose the API key, and because it just makes sense. They could probably directly proxy it and Wireshark couldn't catch it, due to everything being HTTPS. But people could probably catch it by decompiling, so it would make more sense to have the server make the request as part of a GLM request. Not that I think this is plausible - I'm not sure.
Verbally minimising potential threats is not a valid approach to managing risk. We have seen mass misuse of tokens acquired through nefarious means to distill models and enhance training as a way of catching up recently, among other related issues. It is quite appropriate to wonder what else might be going on.
It's only a cli because they yanked out the opencode desktop code. (As well as the opencode go/zen model provider)
Edit: my theory is they wanted to mimic being the primary provider in a quick way with a lot of string replace. Though they could have added opencode back as a regular provider.
MiMo Code adds a lot of cool orchestration features to OpenCode! It definitely is NOT a quick find-replace job, it's genuinely someone's research project to create a better agent harness building on top of free software, and that's awesome. See https://mimo.xiaomi.com/blog/mimo-code-long-horizon
Given that there's such severe concern being expressed by Anthropic about Claude being distilled, and the idea that the harness is part of the the moat, it doesn't seem super surprising that the other side of that would try to also make it harder for them to tell how well they're doing and what their approach is.
You're surprised? I think harnesses are almost as important as the underlying model. Folks have been able to improve benchmark results by nearly 2x based on harness alone.
Harnesses are quickly becoming critical components of the "model" itself imo. Not shocking to me at all that a company that spots a revenue opportunity is keeping its harness closed source.
I am not surprised it is not open source. These harnesses are hard to build - they are not just wrappers - and often they contain business logic that is not suitable for public distribution for all kinds of reasons.
If you're already used to your TUI coding agent, you don't need the desktop agent. Although it is nice that it is there for folks who prefer the Codex App/Claude App UI approach.
Yeah, I use GLM 5.2 in OpenCode, running in a Docker container with CodeNomad as the web-based GUI. It works perfectly; I can access it from anywhere, and it runs all models (except for Anthropic's subscriptions).
For some tasks, it's better. Opus refuses tasks for me pretty regularly. GLM 5.2 has never refused a task. So for anything security-related or that touches on topics that trigger Opus's safety guardrails, I use GLM 5.2.
OTOH, for anything related to UI design, I use Opus 4.8. It's much better at taking relatively vague descriptions of user interfaces and a mockup of a related UI and combining them into an immaculate design.
For anything else, I tend to run tasks in Opus and then have GLM review them and write a Markdown file with anything it finds. Then I have Opus review the markdown file and fix the issues it agrees with. The reason I usually go with Opus 4.8 first is mainly that it's faster. Opus 4.8 is, on average, about twice as fast as GLM 5.2 running on z'ai's infrastructure for the same task. There's a large variance (sometimes GLM 5.2 is pretty fast and Opus 4.8 is pretty slow), but on average it's a very noticeable difference.
When I run into Anthropic's Quota, I switch to GLM 5.2 rather than Sonnet. I don't think there's much reason to ever use Sonnet for anything if you can use GLM 5.2 instead.
This is all pretty subjective, of course. On average, I think Opus 4.8 is still a better, more reliable, and faster model, but if it went away tomorrow and I only had GLM 5.2, I wouldn't be too sad about it; I'd get things done with GLM 5.2 just fine.
I’ve never had a refusal coding, and in some areas (AI red teaming specifically) I’ve found it quite good at recognizing and discussing “white hat” stuff that in the past I think would have got refusals.
But when there was the Hantavirus thing a while back, I asked it if there was a vaccine under development and got a refusal immediately. I’ve had a few like that. It seems they’ve implemented really poor guardrails on certain topics (CBRN and cyber) that have lots of false positives. But if you actually chat with the model itself it’s quite lucid about what is legitimately dangerous and what is just performative “AI Safety” style refusal.
Yeah, I’ve had Opus (and Fable) perform full security audits on my codebases that would run for 30mins. That’s what I think would have tripped it but went just fine.
Are you micromanaging your GLM costs? It seems the best bang for buck strategy right now is a Opencode Go subscription to get the subsidized rate and then switch to Openrouter's model above and beyond that + make use of a dual model strategy by having GLM 5.2 do planning and Deepseek V4 Flash for implementation.
Nice, lucky! The Opencode Go GLM 5.2 quota gets used up so fast. It's an expensive model. And while impressive for being open weight, it seems slower than Opus and GPT. So I typically only use it after exhausting quotas of discounted GPT5.5 or Opus 4.6^ paid plans.
Do you guys use it through open router? Do you have any concerns about how the data you send is being intercepted? Not that I trust Anthropic but it’s widely agreed that it’s kosher to use them for commercial work, I can’t see comfortably sending any customer data to openrouter.
Edit- I see down-thread you use z.ai directly. Same concern, aren’t you worried about using it for professional stuff.
I'm worried, but I'm worried about all of these providers. There's a good chance Anthropic and OpenAI will go bankrupt in the next five to ten years, and all of their data will go to the highest bidder.
There's no customer data sent to anyone, though. I run OpenCode and Claude Code in a Docker container that only has access to a subset of my code base. There are no secrets in there, and I'm vaguely ok with z.ai using this to train their models.
Looks quite pretty! Not sure if I want to try that instead of OpenCode, maybe. OpenCode also has a desktop app, I will admit that I like their TUI one better (and honestly more than Claude Code TUI) but whole the desktop version is kinda more basic, it's nice enough: https://opencode.ai/download
That said, it's interesting that they're releasing a bunch of stuff: ZCode, OCR.z.ai, Image.z.ai, Audio.z.ai, AutoClaw and some other stuff that https://chat.z.ai/ links to. That's a lot of stuff for one org to pull off.
Figured I'd try out their Pro coding plan, seems like it doesn't necessarily give me that much quota than Opus (at least given how many tokens are needed for accomplishing a certain task), but GLM 5.2 in of itself seems like a beefier Sonnet model, pretty good.
I would agree I cannot bear to use the TUI and I find myself in the terminal quite often. The value is good on the $10 plan so I still get decent usage on the desktop client but I would prefer a better terminal interface.
I would very much agree. Even the hand icon, the usage in the text field, and the sidebar style are 1:1 identical to Codex. It's a misleading title - it's not close the Claude Code.
Does anyone use an agnostic TUI or harness for development tasks that can fairly seamlessly switch between providers?
I'm wanting local context in the spirit of "here are 3 AI providers available, for coding tasks use this one... and for writing prose use this one... and for generating images use this one..." etc.
OpenCode was the first agent harness I used, and I have always like it. You can configure a wide variety of providers, but it's open source and has a number of core contributors.
The other opinionated option is Pi (the Pi agent harness). This is a great lightweight option and also supports a number of providers. You can also use local model servers.
I’ve written a skill for codex and Claude code that designates an orchestrator on the primary worktree and is agnostic about what type of AI workers are on the N supporting worktrees.
The orchestrator knows which AI client is running in any given worktree, so it would be fairly easy to designate which AI should receive what kind of tasks.
You run either Claude or Codex in tabs for each work tree.
I do have some AI TUI specific instructions, for instance codex is primitive at monitoring compared to CC. So, there are additional notes for Codex workers on how to properly monitor for new "mail."
You work with the orchestrator on the primary worktree and allow it to delegates tasks to the workers and answer their smaller questions.
It surfaces results and assisting them with context clearing when needed.
The orchestrator and workers communicate using a simple shared file system under tmp/* and together they can handle a big and varied workload.
I use iterm2, so I’ve also added iterm2 specific python that allows the orchestrator to “kick” a worker or perform tasks otherwise veto'd by the TUIs (ie /clear) by modifying the input and submitting it.
have used both pi and opencode for the last 6 months, haven't opened a proprietary harness (cc, codex, cursor) in that same amount of time. right now i'm on pi and i can switch seamlessly between any model across any provider i want, even mid session. can even point them at locally running models.
i think people don't realize how much better life is over on this side, cc and codex rely entirely on vendor lock in imo.
Its nice if you used local, but needed å beefier modell, or more context Window.
It will eat input tokens, but you do that all the time unless you have input caching.
i like the more minimal design of the tui, feels more integrated with my existing terminal workflows. oc always looked a little out of place. i really like pi's extension ecosystem as well.
I use the one that I've been developing since 2023. It's intended to be used in exactly this spirit! Written in Go, has image support (which has yet to be fleshed out).
It supports MCP (unlike Pi), sandboxing (with user-mode networking), and runs efficiently at huge contexts.
i like Chinese open weight model that offer cheap token but i only use it for my personal project.
China have a history of stealing IPs/trade secrets and Chinese court favored its own local companies. while US have a robust court that can enforce IPs. if you want to risk your company's IPs/trade secrets/data for some cheap token. Go ahead and use Z.ai's services.
I don't find a closed-source Chinese agent system trustworthy.
It is essentially a black box with full user permissions, meaning you are just handing over your entire system to a Chinese-owned server. With OpenCode and its GLM provider, at least I can monitor which files were read, which were edited, and what commands were executed.
Not to mention that Chinese national security laws legally obligate companies to cooperate with state intelligence and counter-espionage efforts [0]. If you have this installed on a corporate workstation, and your company is large enough, the possibility of them spying on you is not just a risk—it's almost a certainty.
Thank you. It doesn't make sense to me how much people trust our companies so much more than Chinese ones for no reason. This country has an abysmal track record when it comes to respecting its citizen's rights or privacy. Propaganda working as intended I suppose.
It’s not no reason. At a fundamental level I don’t trust the companies any differently. But at a professional level, nobody is going to question my using Claude or OpenAI in a professional capacity - to work on customer projects, analyze their data, etc.
I also consider Microsoft to be the biggest industrial spy in the world, them and google both are no doubt mining everything you type into office / gsuite, all your emails, etc. But nobody bats an eye when you write a word doc about some sensitive matter.
If my customers thought I was feeding their data into a Chinese owned LLM API (which to be clear I’m not), I don’t think it would go over well, and I’d be exposed legally to all sorts of things.
So the reason is risk aversion and desire to participate in US / western commerce. One can debate the actual threat, but why would you ever risk sending your data to a processor perceived as dodgy?
Suppose a US citizen, residing and working in the US and never traveling to China, crosses The Powers That Be. Which Power is more likely to do worse things to said citizen? Pretty unlikely they'll be rendered to one of the illegal Chinese jails in Brooklyn, more likely they'll be sent to Gitmo or a black site.
This. For a typical citizen, your own government is a far bigger threat than a foreign one.
That's why, all other things equal, I try to keep my own government happy or ignorant, but don't really mind what I share with foreign governments, especially ones who won't forward the info to my own government.
Both are abysmal, but as a US citizen bad behavior from Chinese corporations and government is vastly more limited in how negatively it can impact my life in a practical way than bad behavior from US corporations and government.
It’s just a coincidence that both the US and china have the absolute worst privacy concerns. They are the top shelf IMO. Comparing them I’d say they’re about equal, really, especially once we consider the financial sector and credit.
You know you're sitting here on the open Internet complaining about the US government with literally zero fear of any repercussions in any sense whatsoever?
You should go to an actual authoritarian country and just ask someone their opinion on their government.
The difference between flippant, hyperbolic complaining (you) and someone who will actually glance over their shoulder and totally clam up in response to that type of question is quite chilling in reality.
The US is not authoritarian. But in terms of surveillance and privacy violations, we’ve really pushed it to the absolute limit. All of your communications are effectively tapped, especially since the US government can coerce private companies without letting you know.
There are very few exceptions, and of those that exist virtually all are under existential threat constantly.
No, we haven’t “pushed it to the absolute limit.” We’ve pushed it to (and sometimes beyond) what’s Constitutional etc, but no, that’s not “the absolute limit.”
In other countries you can just be beheaded for saying negative things about the government. No trial necessary.
No, it’s quite illegal for the government to coerce private companies. Companies can and should and do sue the government for this.
At least the model weights are open, I’m not American, so to me this is much more trustworthy in every possible way.
You’re talking as if US intelligence are the good guys, and to me at least, they are not to any extent.
While Trump is terrible, all the same morally questionable practices existed under Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. This administration just likes to brag about it. The US has been controlled by an evil technocracy/intelligence apparatus for 25+ years that gives zero f*ks about democracy or a constitution.
What can you gain by looking at the weights, whether open source or not? Are they not what determines the model's output, but in an oblique way? We can't really fix the weights ourselves, weight by weight, or can we?
There's no way to safely use SOTA LLMs if privacy, and IP protection are your concern. Unless you want to spend 100k+ to host a 1T param model. Even if you use OpenCode you're sending all that information to random data centers you know nothing about.
But yes, US intelligence has killed and ruined the lives of far more people than China has. Not sure how so many people buy into the narrative that they're protecting freedom and democracy.. They're protecting their freedom to kill and crush all their enemies and control every "democracy" on earth.
You can run one on a cloud provider. You’re correct that intelligence orgs probably still can access them, but if you’re that high value of a target then you have bigger problems and / or can afford to build an air gapped system or whatever. If you’re just concerned about other companies mining your messages, self hosting in the cloud solves that.
"US intelligence has killed and ruined the lives of far more people than China has" - please provide a strong argument for this statement, with numbers and sources.
I'm no apologist for the US Intelligence and related organizations (not by a very long shot), but that is a very extreme statement to make.
How many Russians, Palestinians, Afghanis, Libyan, Sudanrse, Somalian, Syrians, Iranians and Yemenis people do you think US intelligence has contributed to killing over the last decade?
Or are those not people to you?
China doesn't go around the world using it's military to force it's will upon people.
Every decision the US military, or State Department makes is a product of US intelligence
The foundation of US Intelligence was built by people who literally cried in the meeting when FDR broke ties with Nazi Germany. They proceeded to pardon and protect the perpetrators of genocide after ww2, then went onto hire them. US intelligence is literally built by Nazis.
The CCP was founded on the back of a peasent uprusing. The US is the 4th Reich and the most evil government to ever exist. The people of the US are generally good people, but the Empire itself is pure evil that fuels itself with death and destruction.
Run it in a container under Opencode. It works great, and I even upgraded to their pro plan (~$60/month). If you want it in a container, there's info in my profile under my projects. That code is entirely open source, and it's there simply because I built what I needed for my own work. I'm sure there a zillion other ways to do it. However, I highly advise against running any agent on bare metal, regardless of the company's country of origin. My thesis addresses this directly and repeatedly.
By the way, some pedant recently asked why anyone would run software with only a few stars. My thoughts on that are minimal: people can practice whatever slop logic they want. I've architected and built systems that handled tens of thousands of users. I'm not fucking around. The way I build isn't typical, and I don't suggest anyone try to mimic my approach, but it works for me and the way my mind processes complex systems.
To the peanut gallery: use it or don't, but don't give me a hard time unless you're ready to get one back. I've made plenty of mistakes in my career, and accountability is a crucial part of growth. I'm more than willing to work with anyone using my code, provided they bring valid, substantial criticism to the table.
That's why I like to use Reasonix with Deepseek. Hitting cache makes requests basically free and that's through unsubsidized American providers like Digital Ocean or cloudflare.
I think it’s a real concern. Chinese companies are much more closely tied to the state, as in if you decide to go to China one day they might already have all the data on how you have interacted with their models.
The US is certainly inching in that direction but it’s not like someone from the US government sits at Anthropic’s HQ reading chats from state people of interest.
> all the data on how you have interacted with their models
1) there is a very non-zero chance that the US government also has that data from OpenAI and possibly Anthropic
2) unless you are asking the chinese models to draw up plans to overthrow the chinese government, it's extremely unlikely they would ever care.
while china has a track record of harassing it's own dissident citizens abroad, if you're not chinese and not trying to subvert their government (or are a high-ranking government official yourself), it's kind of silly to suppose they would ever care about you or what you do.
and if you have information they want for their own national development purposes, like EUV engineers, they are much more likely to offer you fabulous amounts of money instead of try to intimidate or threaten it out of you.
to me its more about company's IPs/trade secrets. china have a history of stealing IPs and very poor IPs enforcement while US have an established history of protecting IPs and US court can enforce it but hey, cheap token is more important, right?
In a sense it's a clean reminder that all these, especially non-local, llm tools should NEVER run outside a container. I'm currently looking at z-jail specifically for these scenarios; VMs are too heavy & expose too many sec issues of their own for continual integrated use in my case.
As someone who loves using OpenCode w/ local Chinese open source models, this is basically my take on this as well. There's no way I would ever put a piece of proprietary Chinese software that gets full system control on anything important. This is definitely something I would only ever run sandboxed in a lab environment for toy projects, not for serious work. I feel only marginally better about Codex/Claude Code, hence my strong preference for local LLMs w/ OpenCode, but a proprietary approach to Chinese models is a hard no from me dawg.
For GLM Coding Plan subscribers, quota consumed via Coding Plan for GLM-5.2 in ZCode is discounted by the coefficients below — the same usage draws down less quota, roughly 1.5x the effective allowance.
Peak hours (14:00–18:00 daily) 3x -> 2x
Off-peak (remaining 20 hours) 1x -> 0.67x
I wonder whether that is referring to local time, or CST (UTC+8)?
Thanks. Those are some odd hours though, why would evening time be peak hours? Usually (in the western world anyway), 9AM - 12PM would be peak hours. Things normally slow down post-lunch, and be its slowest at close-of-business.
Because a harness can more easily stop backdoors of a model. A packaged app on the other hand ... let's say I'll skip this until I can compile and package it.
Can anyone tell me if Z.AI's cheapest plan is more or less generous than Claude's cheapest plan? If it is more or less generous, could you describe the extent of the difference?
(If this comment is too formal, I'm sorry. I used Google Translate to it [this line was NOT translated])
if you're going to try this one out, don't be surprised to get this message repeatedly, like 4 out of 5 prompts you're trying to send, 24/7, this is gonna be your new friend, then you'll learn to write the only prompt that matters: "retry", "retry", "retry"
Here's the message: "Cannot connect to API: write EPIPE"
"Quality" of the harness matters a lot to the user experience, and the construction of the harness will depend on the behavior/quirks of the underlying model. So, if you're using Claude Code, you can expect it to work best with Anthropic models, and expect other model-makers to want you to use the harness they've developed.
It's sad to see that the teams that have the most resources that can contribute to development of next-gen harnesses are essentially copying the same exact thing from each other, with no meaningful changes.
And most of the advancement and experimentation happens in some random 0-star github repos.
I've been working on my own private harness for the past 8 months, and I've been collecting ideas from such repos I've stumbled upon.
pi-tmux is one such example (seems to be archived now) which inspired me to use tmux as communication layer and provide visibility of subagents of multiple models in their native harnesses [1].
There's also herdr, which is not 0-stars, but is super interesting but lesser known project [2]. This also has interesting substrates to allow agent coordination.
None of these are harnesses per se, but they're pointing towards clear gaps in existing harnesses. For example, we've known for a while now that compounding knowledge of different class of models achieves better performance. Why is there no harness where this is a native functionality? And there's no harness where subagents are first class citizens both in terms of capabilities and UX.
Yea not touching this with an any-foot pole. They are just keeping up with the Joneses now. There is no reason for this to exist but there IS a reason it is not open source. ;)
You're referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48751752, which was the third submission of this. The original submission was in fact to https://zcode.z.ai/en, so I took that one and re-upped it in order to have a place to merge the thread. Seemed fairest!
It's impressive all these companies are getting away with "base usage allowance included" [1] or "standard limits" [2], layering the higher plans as a multiplier of that "base" but never disclosing what it is.
I guess the base is whatever the profit margin needs to be this month.
[1]: https://zcode.z.ai/en#:~:text=Base%20usage%20allowance%20inc...
[2]: https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16275805?hl=en#:~:t...
When running the app, it actually tells you what the base usages are, but the name of the plans are different from the page. It reads:
Start plan: 5 Million tokens a day (GLM-5.2 3M, GLM-5 Turbo 2M)
For individuals: (+150% quota) $18.00USD+ For individual developers with a dedicated Coding Plan quota.
Now, if only we can figure out what all the others are providing as part of their subscriptions we can compare. (Though 3 million tokens of the top model per day seems kinda low. But, I guess that's what the 5x plan is for. I'd still like to be able to compare against all the big providers.)
A strategy that can backfire. An unpredictable tool is worse than a bad tool.
I'm somewhat surprised that this is not open source (from what I can tell). Compare to Mimo Code https://github.com/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-Code (which is a CLI, while this is a desktop app).
I don't even know what I would do with a desktop app. I'm running these things in headless VMs, so I can run them with `--dangerously-skip-permissions` or whatever. I don't trust them, even without that flag, on my desktop/laptop.
a well-design IDE should abstract that away, i.e. run the agent in the headless VMs while give you an abstraction that you would feel like you are running the agent locally with all the benefits (editor, browser, diffs, debugger, etc)
Good desktop apps in this category can manage agents across any number of remote SSH hosts.
But, it's still running on my desktop/laptop. I don't trust them to run on my machine. But, I guess I could run one VM with a desktop to contain the desktop app. Or, just keep using CLI agents.
For local tasks you can only give agents delegated that execute your deterministic read or write on an allowed set of files(e.g pi does this) and execute rights only on containers with no network access. That should get you 95% unblocked for most tasks you want to do with an LLM pretty safely.
You can do a brainstorming with web on a remote container prototyping based on that brainstorm on another container with no network access.
The one thing that is less trustworthy is using local agents for service management, you definitely want to have them scoped to dev/testing. I would never trust an agent to execute any command in production or sensitive data at all
Is the trust concern for the agent running in any form on your machine? Like in a VM on your machine as well or do you mean on the host itself?
I have read about people giving an agent full access to their main system saying they have nothing of value. To me, that's a strange opinion to have with the distinction between what's private and what's secret.
I don't run agents directly on my desktop/laptop machine. I run them in VMs or containers (sometimes in containers on VMs). There have been too many credentials stealing exploits via prompt injection and the like for me to be willing to let an agent roam around on my personal system.
I've also started creating new github deploy keys for each repo in use on a VM, so the blast area for any given agent disaster is "a couple/few github repos and whatever credentials were needed for the agent/model".
I wouldn't let a coworker, even one I know pretty well, log into my personal account on my machines...why would I let an agent that can be tricked into uploading all my credentials to an attackers web server?
The agents have sandboxes, but those are loose. Not enforced by anything outside of the agent harness itself.
Oh yeah, that sounds wise to me. Some people don't run the agents on a VM on their own machine and opt for a VPS somewhere. And I was wondering if privacy and security had anything to do with their decision.
I'm working on a credential broker that would keep credentials vaulted and parcel out access on a per-grant basis. Is that something you'd find useful or is your setup comprehensive enough? We would be allowing people to draft access policies with natural language, I figured it would be useful for things like vercel, stripe access etc.
What's stopping a CLI from doing the same?
I've never used IDEs and never will, why are these things being constantly shoved down our throats?
Zcode allows you to connect to a Docker container, or to a VM using ssh.
I finally repurposed an old server just for that and for anyone reading who has not had a chance to use --dangerously-etc. it's awesome, do it :)
They might be sending some user requests to Anthropic to gather trading data for their own models. If they do so, perhaps they need to add some tracer to request that they prefer to hide.
Wireshark would catch that easy-peasy.
The request would need to be done from their service, so as not to expose the API key, and because it just makes sense. They could probably directly proxy it and Wireshark couldn't catch it, due to everything being HTTPS. But people could probably catch it by decompiling, so it would make more sense to have the server make the request as part of a GLM request. Not that I think this is plausible - I'm not sure.
Source? Or is it "trust me bro"?
"might" means pure speculation
Literally just FUD unless someone has code to point at.
Verbally minimising potential threats is not a valid approach to managing risk. We have seen mass misuse of tokens acquired through nefarious means to distill models and enhance training as a way of catching up recently, among other related issues. It is quite appropriate to wonder what else might be going on.
Those nefarious distillers, only we are allowed to freely distill the world’s knowledge into our paid products
It's only a cli because they yanked out the opencode desktop code. (As well as the opencode go/zen model provider)
Edit: my theory is they wanted to mimic being the primary provider in a quick way with a lot of string replace. Though they could have added opencode back as a regular provider.
MiMo Code adds a lot of cool orchestration features to OpenCode! It definitely is NOT a quick find-replace job, it's genuinely someone's research project to create a better agent harness building on top of free software, and that's awesome. See https://mimo.xiaomi.com/blog/mimo-code-long-horizon
Given that there's such severe concern being expressed by Anthropic about Claude being distilled, and the idea that the harness is part of the the moat, it doesn't seem super surprising that the other side of that would try to also make it harder for them to tell how well they're doing and what their approach is.
Unlikely considering they’re publishing the Crown Jewels (GLM 5.2) as open weights.
You're surprised? I think harnesses are almost as important as the underlying model. Folks have been able to improve benchmark results by nearly 2x based on harness alone.
Harnesses are quickly becoming critical components of the "model" itself imo. Not shocking to me at all that a company that spots a revenue opportunity is keeping its harness closed source.
That looks to be a copy of OpenCode
A fork, yes.
I am not surprised it is not open source. These harnesses are hard to build - they are not just wrappers - and often they contain business logic that is not suitable for public distribution for all kinds of reasons.
hard? wut lol....
no. they. are. not.
Some people are just terrible at it.
Z.ai documents integrations with nearly all the popular CLI-based agents: https://docs.z.ai/devpack/tool/others
If you're already used to your TUI coding agent, you don't need the desktop agent. Although it is nice that it is there for folks who prefer the Codex App/Claude App UI approach.
Yeah, I use GLM 5.2 in OpenCode, running in a Docker container with CodeNomad as the web-based GUI. It works perfectly; I can access it from anywhere, and it runs all models (except for Anthropic's subscriptions).
From your experience, is it comparable to Claude Code with Opus 4.8? How does it feel? How do the two differ?
It's comparable, but not the same.
For some tasks, it's better. Opus refuses tasks for me pretty regularly. GLM 5.2 has never refused a task. So for anything security-related or that touches on topics that trigger Opus's safety guardrails, I use GLM 5.2.
OTOH, for anything related to UI design, I use Opus 4.8. It's much better at taking relatively vague descriptions of user interfaces and a mockup of a related UI and combining them into an immaculate design.
For anything else, I tend to run tasks in Opus and then have GLM review them and write a Markdown file with anything it finds. Then I have Opus review the markdown file and fix the issues it agrees with. The reason I usually go with Opus 4.8 first is mainly that it's faster. Opus 4.8 is, on average, about twice as fast as GLM 5.2 running on z'ai's infrastructure for the same task. There's a large variance (sometimes GLM 5.2 is pretty fast and Opus 4.8 is pretty slow), but on average it's a very noticeable difference.
When I run into Anthropic's Quota, I switch to GLM 5.2 rather than Sonnet. I don't think there's much reason to ever use Sonnet for anything if you can use GLM 5.2 instead.
This is all pretty subjective, of course. On average, I think Opus 4.8 is still a better, more reliable, and faster model, but if it went away tomorrow and I only had GLM 5.2, I wouldn't be too sad about it; I'd get things done with GLM 5.2 just fine.
What kinds of tasks does Opus refuse? I’m a light daily user for the past 3 months and Opus has never refused a task for me.
One project I have deals with countries, and any time it touches code related to countries, it stops.
I've also had it refuse security-related tasks, and occasionally it stops without any discernible reason.
I’ve never had a refusal coding, and in some areas (AI red teaming specifically) I’ve found it quite good at recognizing and discussing “white hat” stuff that in the past I think would have got refusals.
But when there was the Hantavirus thing a while back, I asked it if there was a vaccine under development and got a refusal immediately. I’ve had a few like that. It seems they’ve implemented really poor guardrails on certain topics (CBRN and cyber) that have lots of false positives. But if you actually chat with the model itself it’s quite lucid about what is legitimately dangerous and what is just performative “AI Safety” style refusal.
Yeah, I’ve had Opus (and Fable) perform full security audits on my codebases that would run for 30mins. That’s what I think would have tripped it but went just fine.
Try using it as an agent to perform black box security testing on a live instance of your codebase (assuming it's a hosted service).
Are you micromanaging your GLM costs? It seems the best bang for buck strategy right now is a Opencode Go subscription to get the subsidized rate and then switch to Openrouter's model above and beyond that + make use of a dual model strategy by having GLM 5.2 do planning and Deepseek V4 Flash for implementation.
No. I got the yearly highest-end GLM subscription when it was available for a few hundred bucks. I haven't run into quota limits even once.
Nice, lucky! The Opencode Go GLM 5.2 quota gets used up so fast. It's an expensive model. And while impressive for being open weight, it seems slower than Opus and GPT. So I typically only use it after exhausting quotas of discounted GPT5.5 or Opus 4.6^ paid plans.
Yeah, it's definitely slower.
Do you guys use it through open router? Do you have any concerns about how the data you send is being intercepted? Not that I trust Anthropic but it’s widely agreed that it’s kosher to use them for commercial work, I can’t see comfortably sending any customer data to openrouter.
Edit- I see down-thread you use z.ai directly. Same concern, aren’t you worried about using it for professional stuff.
I'm worried, but I'm worried about all of these providers. There's a good chance Anthropic and OpenAI will go bankrupt in the next five to ten years, and all of their data will go to the highest bidder.
There's no customer data sent to anyone, though. I run OpenCode and Claude Code in a Docker container that only has access to a subset of my code base. There are no secrets in there, and I'm vaguely ok with z.ai using this to train their models.
Thank you, this is the type of hands-on experience report i was looking for.
Also, kudos to the Z.ai team for adding Linux support from day one.
Looks quite pretty! Not sure if I want to try that instead of OpenCode, maybe. OpenCode also has a desktop app, I will admit that I like their TUI one better (and honestly more than Claude Code TUI) but whole the desktop version is kinda more basic, it's nice enough: https://opencode.ai/download
That said, it's interesting that they're releasing a bunch of stuff: ZCode, OCR.z.ai, Image.z.ai, Audio.z.ai, AutoClaw and some other stuff that https://chat.z.ai/ links to. That's a lot of stuff for one org to pull off.
Figured I'd try out their Pro coding plan, seems like it doesn't necessarily give me that much quota than Opus (at least given how many tokens are needed for accomplishing a certain task), but GLM 5.2 in of itself seems like a beefier Sonnet model, pretty good.
Their tui is quite heavy and crashing quite often as compared to claude code.
Which are you talking about? OpenCode or ZCode?
OpenCode
I would agree I cannot bear to use the TUI and I find myself in the terminal quite often. The value is good on the $10 plan so I still get decent usage on the desktop client but I would prefer a better terminal interface.
[delayed]
UI-wise this looks a lot closer to Codex than Claude Code. It's basically an exact copy of Codex.
I would very much agree. Even the hand icon, the usage in the text field, and the sidebar style are 1:1 identical to Codex. It's a misleading title - it's not close the Claude Code.
Which makes keeping Codex closed source look even sillier. Software is no longer anyone's moat. Just let it go.
I thought codex was open source https://github.com/openai/codex
The CLI / engine is, the desktop app and its plugins (e.g. computer use) are not.
Does anyone use an agnostic TUI or harness for development tasks that can fairly seamlessly switch between providers?
I'm wanting local context in the spirit of "here are 3 AI providers available, for coding tasks use this one... and for writing prose use this one... and for generating images use this one..." etc.
https://opencode.ai/
OpenCode was the first agent harness I used, and I have always like it. You can configure a wide variety of providers, but it's open source and has a number of core contributors.
The other opinionated option is Pi (the Pi agent harness). This is a great lightweight option and also supports a number of providers. You can also use local model servers.
Circus Chief allows you to do this: https://github.com/ferrislucas/Circus-Chief
(Full disclosure: it’s my project)
I’ve written a skill for codex and Claude code that designates an orchestrator on the primary worktree and is agnostic about what type of AI workers are on the N supporting worktrees.
The orchestrator knows which AI client is running in any given worktree, so it would be fairly easy to designate which AI should receive what kind of tasks.
You run either Claude or Codex in tabs for each work tree. I do have some AI TUI specific instructions, for instance codex is primitive at monitoring compared to CC. So, there are additional notes for Codex workers on how to properly monitor for new "mail."
You work with the orchestrator on the primary worktree and allow it to delegates tasks to the workers and answer their smaller questions.
It surfaces results and assisting them with context clearing when needed.
The orchestrator and workers communicate using a simple shared file system under tmp/* and together they can handle a big and varied workload.
I use iterm2, so I’ve also added iterm2 specific python that allows the orchestrator to “kick” a worker or perform tasks otherwise veto'd by the TUIs (ie /clear) by modifying the input and submitting it.
have used both pi and opencode for the last 6 months, haven't opened a proprietary harness (cc, codex, cursor) in that same amount of time. right now i'm on pi and i can switch seamlessly between any model across any provider i want, even mid session. can even point them at locally running models.
i think people don't realize how much better life is over on this side, cc and codex rely entirely on vendor lock in imo.
Does a mid-session provider switch result in loading the entire context into the new model, inflating session cost?
I don't think I understand the token/cost implications of this feature
Its nice if you used local, but needed å beefier modell, or more context Window. It will eat input tokens, but you do that all the time unless you have input caching.
Haha I pretty much commented the same thing one minute apart.
You can use Claude Code with a self hosted model no problem. I don't believe you can switch during a session though.
codex is open source https://github.com/openai/codex/ it's definitely geared towards openai but it is completely open source
why did you switch from oc to pi?
i like the more minimal design of the tui, feels more integrated with my existing terminal workflows. oc always looked a little out of place. i really like pi's extension ecosystem as well.
I stumbled upon https://omp.sh and haven't really felt the need to ever use anything different.
"omp is a fork of Pi by Mario Zechner, rewritten as a coding-first surface: sessions, subagents, slash commands, extensions — all TypeScript..."
I use the one that I've been developing since 2023. It's intended to be used in exactly this spirit! Written in Go, has image support (which has yet to be fleshed out).
It supports MCP (unlike Pi), sandboxing (with user-mode networking), and runs efficiently at huge contexts.
https://codeberg.org/mlow/lmcli
(The screenshot in the folder is a little bit out of date, but is still representative of the overall look)
Also Goose from the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) (subsidy of the Linux Foundation).
https://goose-docs.ai/
I’ve been using Crush with Openrouter and have good success lately
https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush
i like Chinese open weight model that offer cheap token but i only use it for my personal project.
China have a history of stealing IPs/trade secrets and Chinese court favored its own local companies. while US have a robust court that can enforce IPs. if you want to risk your company's IPs/trade secrets/data for some cheap token. Go ahead and use Z.ai's services.
FYI you can use Z.AI models on infra not in China...
I don't find a closed-source Chinese agent system trustworthy.
It is essentially a black box with full user permissions, meaning you are just handing over your entire system to a Chinese-owned server. With OpenCode and its GLM provider, at least I can monitor which files were read, which were edited, and what commands were executed.
Not to mention that Chinese national security laws legally obligate companies to cooperate with state intelligence and counter-espionage efforts [0]. If you have this installed on a corporate workstation, and your company is large enough, the possibility of them spying on you is not just a risk—it's almost a certainty.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Law_of_t...
I agree. I don't find the US competitors trustworthy either. I think open source is the way here.
Thank you. It doesn't make sense to me how much people trust our companies so much more than Chinese ones for no reason. This country has an abysmal track record when it comes to respecting its citizen's rights or privacy. Propaganda working as intended I suppose.
It’s not no reason. At a fundamental level I don’t trust the companies any differently. But at a professional level, nobody is going to question my using Claude or OpenAI in a professional capacity - to work on customer projects, analyze their data, etc.
I also consider Microsoft to be the biggest industrial spy in the world, them and google both are no doubt mining everything you type into office / gsuite, all your emails, etc. But nobody bats an eye when you write a word doc about some sensitive matter.
If my customers thought I was feeding their data into a Chinese owned LLM API (which to be clear I’m not), I don’t think it would go over well, and I’d be exposed legally to all sorts of things.
So the reason is risk aversion and desire to participate in US / western commerce. One can debate the actual threat, but why would you ever risk sending your data to a processor perceived as dodgy?
If you think the US has an "abysmal" track record on this, what words would you use to describe China's track record?
"Abysmal", but that's beside the point.
Suppose a US citizen, residing and working in the US and never traveling to China, crosses The Powers That Be. Which Power is more likely to do worse things to said citizen? Pretty unlikely they'll be rendered to one of the illegal Chinese jails in Brooklyn, more likely they'll be sent to Gitmo or a black site.
This. For a typical citizen, your own government is a far bigger threat than a foreign one.
That's why, all other things equal, I try to keep my own government happy or ignorant, but don't really mind what I share with foreign governments, especially ones who won't forward the info to my own government.
That's actually not beside the point as it relates to GP's comment.
Both are abysmal, but as a US citizen bad behavior from Chinese corporations and government is vastly more limited in how negatively it can impact my life in a practical way than bad behavior from US corporations and government.
also abysmal. two things can be bad at the same time
Yeah, but if you reach for the top shelf every time you need a word, you can't compare things anymore.
It’s just a coincidence that both the US and china have the absolute worst privacy concerns. They are the top shelf IMO. Comparing them I’d say they’re about equal, really, especially once we consider the financial sector and credit.
lmfao
You know you're sitting here on the open Internet complaining about the US government with literally zero fear of any repercussions in any sense whatsoever?
You should go to an actual authoritarian country and just ask someone their opinion on their government.
The difference between flippant, hyperbolic complaining (you) and someone who will actually glance over their shoulder and totally clam up in response to that type of question is quite chilling in reality.
The US is not authoritarian. But in terms of surveillance and privacy violations, we’ve really pushed it to the absolute limit. All of your communications are effectively tapped, especially since the US government can coerce private companies without letting you know.
There are very few exceptions, and of those that exist virtually all are under existential threat constantly.
No, we haven’t “pushed it to the absolute limit.” We’ve pushed it to (and sometimes beyond) what’s Constitutional etc, but no, that’s not “the absolute limit.”
In other countries you can just be beheaded for saying negative things about the government. No trial necessary.
No, it’s quite illegal for the government to coerce private companies. Companies can and should and do sue the government for this.
Perhaps you have not heard of Francesca Albanese?
USA government does repercussions, severe ones.
Wow, is GP afraid of being sanctioned?
Big if true, but I doubt it.
But really, where is the difference in data misuse from the US and China? Because the US has been "friends" in the past?
"abysmal" probably.
depends if you look through China citizen point of view or someone in the west
China is still doing horrendous things to its population that the US stopped doing over 100 years ago. Not the same.
At least the model weights are open, I’m not American, so to me this is much more trustworthy in every possible way. You’re talking as if US intelligence are the good guys, and to me at least, they are not to any extent.
We are talking about an agent harness here, not a model.
Nevertheless, Americans thinking they are morally superior to China is always quite funny.
This administration is corrupt, cruel and doesn’t care about human rights.
And the worst is… Americans have voted for that administration…. twice!
I digress…
How is this an agent harness? It’s the harness and the model if it’s weights
foolish to blame one administration rather than all administrations since jfk was killed for trying to change things
While Trump is terrible, all the same morally questionable practices existed under Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. This administration just likes to brag about it. The US has been controlled by an evil technocracy/intelligence apparatus for 25+ years that gives zero f*ks about democracy or a constitution.
> all the same morally questionable practices existed under Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden.
I’m gonna need a citation on this claim
What can you gain by looking at the weights, whether open source or not? Are they not what determines the model's output, but in an oblique way? We can't really fix the weights ourselves, weight by weight, or can we?
There's no way to safely use SOTA LLMs if privacy, and IP protection are your concern. Unless you want to spend 100k+ to host a 1T param model. Even if you use OpenCode you're sending all that information to random data centers you know nothing about.
But yes, US intelligence has killed and ruined the lives of far more people than China has. Not sure how so many people buy into the narrative that they're protecting freedom and democracy.. They're protecting their freedom to kill and crush all their enemies and control every "democracy" on earth.
You can run one on a cloud provider. You’re correct that intelligence orgs probably still can access them, but if you’re that high value of a target then you have bigger problems and / or can afford to build an air gapped system or whatever. If you’re just concerned about other companies mining your messages, self hosting in the cloud solves that.
Reminds me a bit of the old “is your adversary Mossad or not Mossad” decision matrix https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
"US intelligence has killed and ruined the lives of far more people than China has" - please provide a strong argument for this statement, with numbers and sources.
I'm no apologist for the US Intelligence and related organizations (not by a very long shot), but that is a very extreme statement to make.
How many Russians, Palestinians, Afghanis, Libyan, Sudanrse, Somalian, Syrians, Iranians and Yemenis people do you think US intelligence has contributed to killing over the last decade?
Or are those not people to you?
China doesn't go around the world using it's military to force it's will upon people.
Every decision the US military, or State Department makes is a product of US intelligence
The foundation of US Intelligence was built by people who literally cried in the meeting when FDR broke ties with Nazi Germany. They proceeded to pardon and protect the perpetrators of genocide after ww2, then went onto hire them. US intelligence is literally built by Nazis.
The CCP was founded on the back of a peasent uprusing. The US is the 4th Reich and the most evil government to ever exist. The people of the US are generally good people, but the Empire itself is pure evil that fuels itself with death and destruction.
> China doesn't go around the world using it's military to force it's will upon people.
No, they use it on their own people. Come on, the USA is bad, but comparing it to China isn’t going to show the contrast you are looking for.
This is exactly the same with providers from the USA.
Run it in a container under Opencode. It works great, and I even upgraded to their pro plan (~$60/month). If you want it in a container, there's info in my profile under my projects. That code is entirely open source, and it's there simply because I built what I needed for my own work. I'm sure there a zillion other ways to do it. However, I highly advise against running any agent on bare metal, regardless of the company's country of origin. My thesis addresses this directly and repeatedly.
By the way, some pedant recently asked why anyone would run software with only a few stars. My thoughts on that are minimal: people can practice whatever slop logic they want. I've architected and built systems that handled tens of thousands of users. I'm not fucking around. The way I build isn't typical, and I don't suggest anyone try to mimic my approach, but it works for me and the way my mind processes complex systems.
To the peanut gallery: use it or don't, but don't give me a hard time unless you're ready to get one back. I've made plenty of mistakes in my career, and accountability is a crucial part of growth. I'm more than willing to work with anyone using my code, provided they bring valid, substantial criticism to the table.
That's why I like to use Reasonix with Deepseek. Hitting cache makes requests basically free and that's through unsubsidized American providers like Digital Ocean or cloudflare.
You can always run it in bwrap or rootless podman.
nono, the sandboxing tool, has been working great for me
If you are not US based that’s not really a big concern.
I think it’s a real concern. Chinese companies are much more closely tied to the state, as in if you decide to go to China one day they might already have all the data on how you have interacted with their models.
The US is certainly inching in that direction but it’s not like someone from the US government sits at Anthropic’s HQ reading chats from state people of interest.
> all the data on how you have interacted with their models
1) there is a very non-zero chance that the US government also has that data from OpenAI and possibly Anthropic
2) unless you are asking the chinese models to draw up plans to overthrow the chinese government, it's extremely unlikely they would ever care.
while china has a track record of harassing it's own dissident citizens abroad, if you're not chinese and not trying to subvert their government (or are a high-ranking government official yourself), it's kind of silly to suppose they would ever care about you or what you do.
and if you have information they want for their own national development purposes, like EUV engineers, they are much more likely to offer you fabulous amounts of money instead of try to intimidate or threaten it out of you.
to me its more about company's IPs/trade secrets. china have a history of stealing IPs and very poor IPs enforcement while US have an established history of protecting IPs and US court can enforce it but hey, cheap token is more important, right?
> if you decide to go to China one day they might already have all the data
PRISM ... XKeyscore ...
> The US is certainly inching in that direction
Itching to go in a direction that (publicly known) they have been in for decades now.
It's interesting how you would say this about China but not about the US, especially given what's happened recently with Anthropic and the US govt.
Do you really think the US government doesn't get access or couldn't get access to any of your chats with Claude?
How's that different from Codex (gui app) or Claude?
Codex is open source: https://github.com/openai/codex
Well, it's different from OpenCode
The codex cli too is open source, afaik.
In a sense it's a clean reminder that all these, especially non-local, llm tools should NEVER run outside a container. I'm currently looking at z-jail specifically for these scenarios; VMs are too heavy & expose too many sec issues of their own for continual integrated use in my case.
yes but the americans are also doing it, and i don’t really work on anything worth spying on
so basically no worse than europe or usa, but they are just more open about it
> It is essentially a black box with full user permissions,
You mean, like Windows and Android?
As someone who loves using OpenCode w/ local Chinese open source models, this is basically my take on this as well. There's no way I would ever put a piece of proprietary Chinese software that gets full system control on anything important. This is definitely something I would only ever run sandboxed in a lab environment for toy projects, not for serious work. I feel only marginally better about Codex/Claude Code, hence my strong preference for local LLMs w/ OpenCode, but a proprietary approach to Chinese models is a hard no from me dawg.
What’s with the 3 subscription plans that are suggestive of being mapped to plans from Anthropic and Open AI?
Do they really correspond roughly? Seems like they’re trying to suggest a discount while still being worth a significant amount of monthly spend.
From https://z.ai/subscribe#code-plans-container:
> Explanation and Recommendations Regarding Usage for Plan-Supported Models
> Note: Peak hours are from 14:00 to 18:00 daily (UTC+8).
Peak hours are 14:00–18:00 (UTC+8)
https://docs.z.ai/devpack/overview
Thanks. Those are some odd hours though, why would evening time be peak hours? Usually (in the western world anyway), 9AM - 12PM would be peak hours. Things normally slow down post-lunch, and be its slowest at close-of-business.
Because westerners are using it is my guess and for them that's right in your window
They're peak hours in Beijing
I don't get why not open source it? You are already open-sourcing your weights!
Because a harness can more easily stop backdoors of a model. A packaged app on the other hand ... let's say I'll skip this until I can compile and package it.
One of these is not like the other.
Can anyone tell me if Z.AI's cheapest plan is more or less generous than Claude's cheapest plan? If it is more or less generous, could you describe the extent of the difference?
(If this comment is too formal, I'm sorry. I used Google Translate to it [this line was NOT translated])
I got around 17m tokens on glm 5.2 then blocked for 4 days on the weekly limit on that plan.
17M tokens... I think it is a lot. What were you working on?
That's like 30 minutes of MCP usage.
Is that 17M output tokens?
At 200k context that is only 85 requests for a whole week.
Those are some odd hours though, why would evening time be peak hours? Usually (in the western world anyway), 9AM - 12PM would be peak hours.
Z.ai is based in China and serves out of Singapore, that's surely why.
if you're going to try this one out, don't be surprised to get this message repeatedly, like 4 out of 5 prompts you're trying to send, 24/7, this is gonna be your new friend, then you'll learn to write the only prompt that matters: "retry", "retry", "retry"
Here's the message: "Cannot connect to API: write EPIPE"
This isn't a CLI, so not really like Claude Code. Looks more like Cursor or Conductor.
Is this GUI only?
Yes.
As someone who doesnt use these tools, why does every AI company need their own version of Claude Code? Is there more to it than vendor lock-in?
"Quality" of the harness matters a lot to the user experience, and the construction of the harness will depend on the behavior/quirks of the underlying model. So, if you're using Claude Code, you can expect it to work best with Anthropic models, and expect other model-makers to want you to use the harness they've developed.
But mostly vendor lock-in, I imagine.
implementing their own version of steganographic monitoring lol
A joke but also not a joke.
Try to understand the token usage/cost with subscription plan comparing with Claude Pro. Is there benchmark somewhere for such info?
I think they market is as 3x the usage for the same price. Although, the prices are not the same, and Anthropic's usage constantly changes, so...
It's sad to see that the teams that have the most resources that can contribute to development of next-gen harnesses are essentially copying the same exact thing from each other, with no meaningful changes.
And most of the advancement and experimentation happens in some random 0-star github repos.
Could you share some of these 0-star github repos?
I've been working on my own private harness for the past 8 months, and I've been collecting ideas from such repos I've stumbled upon.
pi-tmux is one such example (seems to be archived now) which inspired me to use tmux as communication layer and provide visibility of subagents of multiple models in their native harnesses [1].
There's also herdr, which is not 0-stars, but is super interesting but lesser known project [2]. This also has interesting substrates to allow agent coordination.
None of these are harnesses per se, but they're pointing towards clear gaps in existing harnesses. For example, we've known for a while now that compounding knowledge of different class of models achieves better performance. Why is there no harness where this is a native functionality? And there's no harness where subagents are first class citizens both in terms of capabilities and UX.
[1] https://github.com/offline-ant/pi-tmux
[2] https://github.com/ogulcancelik/herdr
There the ones with most to prove
Yea not touching this with an any-foot pole. They are just keeping up with the Joneses now. There is no reason for this to exist but there IS a reason it is not open source. ;)
Isn't competition and open markets a reason for this to exist?
Funny, I think the same about Claude.
Didn't Claude Code pioneer this style of agent?
They said Claude, not Claude Code.
sweet! i'm heaviliy using glm 5.2 in mouse.dev which is great for mobile. the ui looks really good, similar to cursor agents window ect.
it's an electron app, it highlights wrong spelling but doesn't suggest corrections. how does someone exhibit so much incompetence?
Welcome to using v1.0.0 of any product
How about no? I'd rather use something open source and local. We have enough of 3rd party controlled AI tools.
how is this cheaper?
Is it possible to use their subscription pricing with Opencode?
I use the coding subscription in both Pi and OpenCode without issue.
Is there a CLI version of it?
This comes with a little bit of free credits. (after login)
For those that want something based on Pi Mono:
- https://igorwarzocha.github.io/howcode/
- https://github.com/ruuxi/stella
- https://www.pi-gui.com/
Not using Pi, but based on PI (no extensions possible)
- https://twotimespi.dev/
GLM-5.2 is a great model!
But it already works really well with existing harnesses, I'm not sure why a dedicated one is needed?
I use it with https://swival.dev and everything works perfectly, no tool calling issues and it works fine with long sessions.
I tried it but went back to OC, which feels smarter.
It does have a 1.5x usage promotion for GLM 5.2 on the coding plan so now is a good time to test it...
GLM-5.2 seems capable. It’s just much slower than Opus.
Telemetry enabled?
The original submission was to [0] which I feel must be mentioned.
[0]: https://zcode.z.ai/cn
You're referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48751752, which was the third submission of this. The original submission was in fact to https://zcode.z.ai/en, so I took that one and re-upped it in order to have a place to merge the thread. Seemed fairest!