You can do a brainstorming with web on a remote container prototyping based on that brainstorm on another container with no network access.
The one thing that is less trustworthy is using local agents for service management, you definitely want to have them scoped to dev/testing. I would never trust an agent to execute any command in production or sensitive data at all
I have read about people giving an agent full access to their main system saying they have nothing of value. To me, that's a strange opinion to have with the distinction between what's private and what's secret.
I've also started creating new github deploy keys for each repo in use on a VM, so the blast area for any given agent disaster is "a couple/few github repos and whatever credentials were needed for the agent/model".
I wouldn't let a coworker, even one I know pretty well, log into my personal account on my machines...why would I let an agent that can be tricked into uploading all my credentials to an attackers web server?
The agents have sandboxes, but those are loose. Not enforced by anything outside of the agent harness itself.
In that case, maybe you want VMs at hosting providers. There are companies building ephemeral VM and container orchestration layers for this kind of thing, I haven't played with them, though. It seems like a reasonable idea, though. One isolated environment per project or repo. Only the secrets needed for that one project and an agent that can't reach outside of it.
I've considered building something along those lines, and actually do run my security auditing benchmarks in containers automatically (that was originally to prevent the models from cheating, because you can disable network, but it has other pleasant side effects).
It's actually not that big of a lift these days to spin up containers on-demand and put just what's needed inside it (including the authentication info for the agent). I probably should automate it..right now I just have four permanent VMs setup for my various types of work: My day job, my open source projects, my benchmark and security work, and some side projects. Plus some temporary ones for experiments.
I've never used IDEs and never will, why are these things being constantly shoved down our throats?
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.
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.
A harness is that covering every blind spot or sub-optimal but probable output people have hit in the wild.
no. they. are. not.
Some people are just terrible at it.
Also you don't need to believe me. There is enough evidence in the open source space.
If you're already used to your TUI coding agent, you don't need the desktop agent. Although it is nice that it is there for folks who prefer the Codex App/Claude App UI approach.
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've also had it refuse security-related tasks, and occasionally it stops without any discernible reason.
But when there was the Hantavirus thing a while back, I asked it if there was a vaccine under development and got a refusal immediately. I’ve had a few like that. It seems they’ve implemented really poor guardrails on certain topics (CBRN and cyber) that have lots of false positives. But if you actually chat with the model itself it’s quite lucid about what is legitimately dangerous and what is just performative “AI Safety” style refusal.
Edit- I see down-thread you use z.ai directly. Same concern, aren’t you worried about using it for professional stuff.
There's no customer data sent to anyone, though. I run OpenCode and Claude Code in a Docker container that only has access to a subset of my code base. There are no secrets in there, and I'm vaguely ok with z.ai using this to train their models.
That said, it's interesting that they're releasing a bunch of stuff: ZCode, OCR.z.ai, Image.z.ai, Audio.z.ai, AutoClaw and some other stuff that https://chat.z.ai/ links to. That's a lot of stuff for one org to pull off.
Figured I'd try out their Pro coding plan, seems like it doesn't necessarily give me that much quota than Opus (at least given how many tokens are needed for accomplishing a certain task), but GLM 5.2 in of itself seems like a beefier Sonnet model, pretty good.
I guess the base is whatever the profit margin needs to be this month.
[1]: https://zcode.z.ai/en#:~:text=Base%20usage%20allowance%20inc...
[2]: https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16275805?hl=en#:~:t...
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.
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.
China have a history of stealing IPs/trade secrets and Chinese court favored its own local companies. while US have a robust court that can enforce IPs. if you want to risk your company's IPs/trade secrets/data for some cheap token. Go ahead and use Z.ai's services.
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.
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.
(Full disclosure: it’s my project)
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.
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 don't think I understand the token/cost implications of this feature
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)
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
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 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?
Suppose a US citizen, residing and working in the US and never traveling to China, crosses The Powers That Be. Which Power is more likely to do worse things to said citizen? Pretty unlikely they'll be rendered to one of the illegal Chinese jails in Brooklyn, more likely they'll be sent to Gitmo or a black site.
That's why, all other things equal, I try to keep my own government happy or ignorant, but don't really mind what I share with foreign governments, especially ones who won't forward the info to my own government.
You know you're sitting here on the open Internet complaining about the US government with literally zero fear of any repercussions in any sense whatsoever?
You should go to an actual authoritarian country and just ask someone their opinion on their government.
The difference between flippant, hyperbolic complaining (you) and someone who will actually glance over their shoulder and totally clam up in response to that type of question is quite chilling in reality.
There are very few exceptions, and of those that exist virtually all are under existential threat constantly.
In other countries you can just be beheaded for saying negative things about the government. No trial necessary.
No, it’s quite illegal for the government to coerce private companies. Companies can and should and do sue the government for this.
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…
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?)
I’m gonna need a citation on this claim
But yes, US intelligence has killed and ruined the lives of far more people than China has. Not sure how so many people buy into the narrative that they're protecting freedom and democracy.. They're protecting their freedom to kill and crush all their enemies and control every "democracy" on earth.
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.
Or are those not people to you?
China doesn't go around the world using it's military to force it's will upon people.
Every decision the US military, or State Department makes is a product of US intelligence
The foundation of US Intelligence was built by people who literally cried in the meeting when FDR broke ties with Nazi Germany. They proceeded to pardon and protect the perpetrators of genocide after ww2, then went onto hire them. US intelligence is literally built by Nazis.
The CCP was founded on the back of a peasent uprusing. The US is the 4th Reich and the most evil government to ever exist. The people of the US are generally good people, but the Empire itself is pure evil that fuels itself with death and destruction.
No, they use it on their own people. Come on, the USA is bad, but comparing it to China isn’t going to show the contrast you are looking for.
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.
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.
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.
even companies that proclaim zero data retention have yet to produce a mechanism that makes me trust that claim
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?
You mean, like Windows and Android?
Here's the message: "Cannot connect to API: write EPIPE"
For GLM Coding Plan subscribers, quota consumed via Coding Plan for GLM-5.2 in ZCode is discounted by the coefficients below — the same usage draws down less quota, roughly 1.5x the effective allowance.
Peak hours (14:00–18:00 daily) 3x -> 2x
Off-peak (remaining 20 hours) 1x -> 0.67x
> Explanation and Recommendations Regarding Usage for Plan-Supported Models
> Note: Peak hours are from 14:00 to 18:00 daily (UTC+8).
(If this comment is too formal, I'm sorry. I used Google Translate to it [this line was NOT translated])
At 200k context that is only 85 requests for a whole week.
Do they really correspond roughly? Seems like they’re trying to suggest a discount while still being worth a significant amount of monthly spend.
But mostly vendor lock-in, I imagine.
And most of the advancement and experimentation happens in some random 0-star github repos.
pi-tmux is one such example (seems to be archived now) which inspired me to use tmux as communication layer and provide visibility of subagents of multiple models in their native harnesses [1].
There's also herdr, which is not 0-stars, but is super interesting but lesser known project [2]. This also has interesting substrates to allow agent coordination.
None of these are harnesses per se, but they're pointing towards clear gaps in existing harnesses. For example, we've known for a while now that compounding knowledge of different class of models achieves better performance. Why is there no harness where this is a native functionality? And there's no harness where subagents are first class citizens both in terms of capabilities and UX.
It does have a 1.5x usage promotion for GLM 5.2 on the coding plan so now is a good time to test it...
- https://igorwarzocha.github.io/howcode/
- https://github.com/ruuxi/stella
Not using Pi, but based on PI (no extensions possible)
But it already works really well with existing harnesses, I'm not sure why a dedicated one is needed?
I use it with https://swival.dev and everything works perfectly, no tool calling issues and it works fine with long sessions.
