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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I'd prefer a CLI over a desktop. But then why don't I just use OpenCode?

That looks to be a copy of OpenCode

How is this different from installing Claude Code or Codex? Maybe in the US someone has some hopes about having those makers "legally liable", but in Europe both US and China products seem equally far away and equally closed in all senses.

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.

I believe the incentive here is more tokens. I recall limits being more generous with their inhouse harness

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

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.

Agreed this sucks. We publish ours here and try to be as transparent as possible: https://synthetic.new/rate-limits

Yeah, this is why I like the ACCC in Australia. They wouldn't allow this sort of thing to fly if this was an Australian company.

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

GLM 5.2 is in an uncanny valley where it's too big to run at home, too expensive and slow in comparison to similarly capable model (a good chart here - https://deepswe.datacurve.ai/), and that's just comparing API prices.

When looking at subscription offering by Anthropic and OpenAI, it's not even comparable, as a Codex $200 subscription can easily use a billion tokens per week on GPT 5.5 high/xhigh.

It's an interesting model from the perspective of being the most capable open weight model. But it doesn't have a solid place in this marketplace right now.

I tried it for a couple of hours this morning and yeah, it's a bit slow, and I needed it in peak hours so it also often can't reach the server so that makes it even slower. And I'm not even sure it's just the model, it could very much be the harness. Stalled for 40 minutes on trivial tool calls like `find`, two times...

It shows potential, answer/code quality was solid, but I would need more time with it.

TLDR GLM will take a lot longer to do a task, and maybe spend more tokens depending how complex it is

Its a hell of a lot cheaper though, so for me its worth it. I have more claude experience though, and I would say its almost en par with Opus 4.1

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.

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.

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.

You can do this with role-model, the model router I've built. It routes based on roles and tasks among other things. It has an extension for Pi that lets your coding agent specify request metadata for roles and capabilities etc.

https://github.com/try-works/role-model

If you haven't yet you should give a chance to https://pi.dev

I've been using it exclusively (and extending it, see https://a.l3x.in/ai) for months with mainly GLM-4.7 then 5.1 and now 5.2 and I could hardly be any happier.

I'm still working on a "Github/Forgejo first" based workflow but also quite happy with it already, basically most of my sessions run as a ci/cd job (triggered by "/pi" comments) and generate PRs or push commits to PRs, see https://github.com/shaftoe/pi-coding-agent-action

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.

Circus Chief allows you to do this: https://github.com/ferrislucas/Circus-Chief

(Full disclosure: it’s my project)

I’ve been using Crush with Openrouter and have good success lately

https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush

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

I use Kilo Code for that it's based in OpenCode and it's OpenSource.

I prefer having a GUI for diffs and session history,but if you prefer TUI you can just use OoenCode

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/

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

The US of A ditto

What's your top secret project?

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.

You can always run it in bwrap or rootless podman.

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.

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.

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

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

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

NSA can also legally force companies to spy. Secret spy courts and gag orders are a thing.

Actually there are more such cases against the USA than China in public.

I'm in the US. The benefit of the Chinese spying on me vs a US company is the Chinese can't come to my door and take me to jail.

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.

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?

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

I haven't tried Z.ai, but both Ollama ($20) and OpencodeGo ($10) seem to give me more generous limits than the Claude $20

They give you much better quotas, on the 20USD plan using opus you will quickly run into limits.

The plans may have comparable prices, but the API rates are much cheaper. Especially because it is open weights, so there is competition on places like OpenRouter.

Yes.

"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.

There are different grades of vendor lock-in. There's mechanical lock-in (which is a thing, like .claude folders) and economic lock-in but then we don't pay enough attention to behavioral lock-in. Habit is powerful, and if you can habituate users into a certain flow, change feels bad and they are more likely to stay.

Why not? They are relatively easy to make so why not. Even I made one: https://github.com/computerex/z

implementing their own version of steganographic monitoring lol

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

There the ones with most to prove

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.

This is precisely what I've been working on targeting with https://dirge-code.github.io/

I've written up an explanation of what trips small models ups and how the harness can address that here https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-06-08-dirge-code.html

Lucky you! I'm considering switching from Kimi 2.7. What's your experience so far?

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...

Welcome to using v1.0.0 of any product

OpenCode (TUI and desktop app) can use Qwen local

I built vibn.dev for this purpose, it’s very rough around the edges tho

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

Funny, I think the same about Claude.

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

It did last week. Wow. That didn't last long.

Z.ai is based in China and serves out of Singapore, that's surely why.

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!