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.

A strategy that can backfire. An unpredictable tool is worse than a bad tool.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Also, kudos to the Z.ai team for adding Linux support from day one.

Their tui is quite heavy and crashing quite often as compared to claude code.

I got around 17m tokens on glm 5.2 then blocked for 4 days on the weekly limit on that plan.

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.

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.

I stumbled upon https://omp.sh and haven't really felt the need to ever use anything different.

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.

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 agree. I don't find the US competitors trustworthy either. I think open source is the way here.

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.

This is exactly the same with providers from the USA.

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.

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.

You can always run it in bwrap or rootless podman.

If you are not US based that’s not really a big concern.

How's that different from Codex (gui app) or Claude?

yes but the americans are also doing it, and i don’t really work on anything worth spying on

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.

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.

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.

FYI you can use Z.AI models on infra not in China...

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

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...

"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

Yes.

Isn't competition and open markets a reason for this to exist?

Funny, I think the same about Claude.

Could you share some of these 0-star github repos?

There the ones with most to prove

Welcome to using v1.0.0 of any product

I use the coding subscription in both Pi and OpenCode without issue.

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!