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ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

zcode.z.ai

241–250 of 382 posts

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good desktop apps in this category can manage agents across any number of remote SSH hosts.

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Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#242
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s a real concern. Chinese companies are much more closely tied to the state, as in if you decide to go to China one day they might already have all the data on how you have interacted with their models. 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.

It's interesting how you would say this about China but not about the US, especially given what's happened recently with Anthropic and the US govt. Do you really think the US government doesn't get access or couldn't get access to any of your chats with Claude?

Hmm yeah I really think that the US government doesn’t have access to my Claude chats and wouldn’t be able to without jumping through actual legal hoops like a subpoena or other legal order. More than happy to be wrong if you have a source that points in that direction.

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all the data on how you have interacted with their models 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 an…

to me its more about company's IPs/trade secrets. china have a history of stealing IPs and very poor IPs enforcement while US have an established history of protecting IPs and US court can enforce it but hey, cheap token is more important, right?

I agree, but considering the age of AI was ushered in with the largest and most complete theft of IP in human history, from inside the good 'ol USA, we shouldn't trust any LLM provider with critical information of any kind, and instead push even harder for better local models.

even companies that proclaim zero data retention have yet to produce a mechanism that makes me trust that claim

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#244
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s a real concern. Chinese companies are much more closely tied to the state, as in if you decide to go to China one day they might already have all the data on how you have interacted with their models. 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.

> if you decide to go to China one day they might already have all the data PRISM ... XKeyscore ... > The US is certainly inching in that direction Itching to go in a direction that (publicly known) they have been in for decades now.

The US government is no saint in terms of mass surveillance but there is a gigantic gulf between US governments mass surveillance and China, I think to act otherwise is a bit disingenuous.

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#245
post #114
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We are talking about an agent harness here, not a model. 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…

It didn't stop all of Facebook's behavior, far from it, but we did get to see Zuckerberg hauled in front of Senate committees multiple times (who we do vote for).

This has never happened in China, and will never happen, nor anything like it. Some open oversight is almost always better than possible secret oversight (and do you think that the Chinese government has user privacy on even its top 10 priorities?)

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#246
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm a neophyte. What makes a harness special or all that unique from another? I've had a reasonable experience with Zed and local models, but could be persuaded to put something else in the mix if there is a measurable benefit to be had.

Simple example: a while back LLMs would trip over questions like "how many Rs are in strawberry". Now, the system prompts have a line like "when a user asks for a count, actually count the value by calling a tool if needed". The LLMs cannot get smarter in this regard, next token predictors will hallucinate here.

A harness is that covering every blind spot or sub-optimal but probable output people have hit in the wild, and a lot of problems just have better solutions if you say "break problem A into subproblem B and subproblem C, then solve".

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#247

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?

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.

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#249

The plans on first glance is the same as Anthropic’s. I thought GLM was supposed to be cheaper. Am I missing something?

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.

Re: ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

#250

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.

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

Do you have benchmarks comparing against Pi? The blog post doesn't include any hard numbers.

For example, so far I haven't seen any evidence that LSP integration improves performance for small models vs using grep via a bash tool.

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