ZCode: Claude Code from the Makers of GLM(zcode.z.ai) |
ZCode: Claude Code from the Makers of GLM(zcode.z.ai) |
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...
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…
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
There's an `EN` link at top right
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.
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
> Explanation and Recommendations Regarding Usage for Plan-Supported Models
> Note: Peak hours are from 14:00 to 18:00 daily (UTC+8).
Here's the message: "Cannot connect to API: write EPIPE"
And most of the advancement and experimentation happens in some random 0-star github repos.
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.
But mostly vendor lock-in, I imagine.
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...
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.
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.
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)
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.
I don't think I understand the token/cost implications of this feature
I've never used IDEs and never will, why are these things being constantly shoved down our throats?
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.
Do you really think the US government doesn't get access or couldn't get access to any of your chats with Claude?
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.
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 also had it refuse security-related tasks, and occasionally it stops without any discernible reason.
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.
Edit- I see down-thread you use z.ai directly. Same concern, aren’t you worried about using it for professional stuff.
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.