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ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

zcode.z.ai

31–40 of 382 posts

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#32
post #13

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.

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#33

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.

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.

why did you switch from oc to pi?

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#35

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 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)

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#38

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).

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.

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#39

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.

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#40
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.

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