alt Hacker NewsZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2
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Interesting to see how their harness will show up here. So far, https://cursor.com/evals this even shows still a big gap in performance, and almost no real win in terms of money vs gpt5.5 and sonnet 5.
Which make me raise a question. Why would I install a close source black box, that will send data to a country that you can't make legally liable for even most crazy miss doings.
The market of a hosted commercial version of glm is very weird. yeah you can deploy an open source version or run it locally, sure. This.... hm, i don't know why any company would take any risks to use GLM
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.
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.
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...
For anyone who uses GPT-5.5/Codex as their daily driver, how does GLM-5.2/ZCode compare, esp in a codebase already set up for agentic coding?
no ACP support it seems :( Of all the AI buzzwords I love ACP because of the separation of concern. Let the editor be an editor, the harness be the ai code agent, and the llm be the llm
UI-wise this looks a lot closer to Codex than Claude Code. It's basically an exact copy of Codex.
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.
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Law_of_t...
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
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"
When the harnesses commoditize, it will be the dynamic things like skills that will be the most valuable, useful thing you can bring to a harness. That seems like a long ways away though. There are still meaningful performance differences between agent harnesses.
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])
Closed source? No Thanks
This isn't a CLI, so not really like Claude Code. Looks more like Cursor or Conductor.
The plans on first glance is the same as Anthropic’s. I thought GLM was supposed to be cheaper. Am I missing something?
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?
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.
separation of model and tooling is as important as legislative and judicative, and just ignore any tooling or harness not true open source. they will all slowly creep into your life and choke you trying to lock you in.
is there cli version available for this harness?
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.
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.
I don't get why not open source it? You are already open-sourcing your weights!
I've been using this for a few weeks and it's a real workhorse.
First-party harnesses are great, but i'd really wish this was a CLI and not a GUI
Has anyone come up with a decent harness for small local models, say, gemma4 e4b? I'm trying to roll my own but man, the capability gap is real.
literally I paid in the morning for the pro plan and then they launched this. currently are my fav lab after Anthropic.
I could use them as a provider if they shown concrete price per token. Or concrete number of tokens in each plan. Now I don't know what I would rent from them. If I were to buy hell knows what, I would go to Anthropic.
Try to understand the token usage/cost with subscription plan comparing with Claude Pro. Is there benchmark somewhere for such info?
it's an electron app, it highlights wrong spelling but doesn't suggest corrections. how does someone exhibit so much incompetence?
Does it support Azure openai and aws bedrock models as well?
how is this cheaper?
Coding plans are often out of stock, it's miraculous
Is there any desktop coding app that can be used with local LLM?
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. ;)
Is it possible to use their subscription pricing with Opencode?
This comes with a little bit of free credits. (after login)
I couldn’t find if it is soc 2 etc
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.
eager for zcode-cli. and their coding plan is always selled out.
Is there a CLI version of it?
cool to see how fast they are catching up
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.
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).