ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

The app itself is interesting to me. I can see most of the agent trace (I can't see the tool definitions and the tool input args), I can set up skills and make the agent manage them and I can define sub-agents as well.

The UI itself is a bit weird, but I guess it's not thought to be a general purpose file editor.

I've never used IDEs and never will, why are these things being constantly shoved down our throats?

Also you don't need to believe me. There is enough evidence in the open source space.

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.

I also consider Microsoft to be the biggest industrial spy in the world, them and google both are no doubt mining everything you type into office / gsuite, all your emails, etc. But nobody bats an eye when you write a word doc about some sensitive matter.

If my customers thought I was feeding their data into a Chinese owned LLM API (which to be clear I’m not), I don’t think it would go over well, and I’d be exposed legally to all sorts of things.

So the reason is risk aversion and desire to participate in US / western commerce. One can debate the actual threat, but why would you ever risk sending your data to a processor perceived as dodgy?

Reminds me a bit of the old “is your adversary Mossad or not Mossad” decision matrix https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

I'm no apologist for the US Intelligence and related organizations (not by a very long shot), but that is a very extreme statement to make.

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 and not trying to subvert their government (or are a high-ranking government official yourself), it's kind of silly to suppose they would ever care about you or what you do.

and if you have information they want for their own national development purposes, like EUV engineers, they are much more likely to offer you fabulous amounts of money instead of try to intimidate or threaten it out of you.

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.

Do you really think the US government doesn't get access or couldn't get access to any of your chats with Claude?

At 200k context that is only 85 requests for a whole week.