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GLM 4.5 with Claude Code
- apparent 1y agoI stopped when I got to this sentence and realized the article is written by one of the companies mentioned. > GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5-Air are our latest flagship models Maybe it is great, but with a conflict of interest so obvious I can't exactly take their word for it.
- JimDabell 1y agoZ.AI is the company that created GLM and the link goes to their official documentation. It’s really weird to complain that their official documentation on their official website has a “conflict of interest”.
- nicce 1y agoJust out of curiosity, is the cost of such domain worth it or whether they were just lucky.
- apparent 1y agoThe title has been changed. The original title was wildly positive, and OP has acknowledged it was inappropriate and changed it (see comments below). My issue was with an article being posted with a title saying how amazing two things are together (making it seem like it was somehow an independent review), when it was actually just a marketing post by one of the companies.
- stingraycharles 1y agoAvailable on OpenRouter as well for those who want to test it: https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-4.5 https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-4.5 I would be interested to know where the claim of the “killer combination” comes from. I would also like to know who the people behind Z.ai are — I haven’t heard of them before. Their plans seem crazy cheap compared to Anthropic, especially if their models actually perform better than Opus.
- ekidd 1y ago> I would also like to know who the people behind Z.ai are — I haven’t heard of them before. To be clear, Z.ai are the people who built GLM 4.5, so they're talking up their own product. But to be fair, GLM 4.5 and GLM 4.5 Air are genuinely good coding models. GLM 4.5 Air costs about 10% of what Claude Sonnet does (when hosted on DeepInfra, at least), and it can perform simple coding tasks quite quickly. I haven't tested GLM 4.5 Air, but it seems to be popular as well. If you can easily afford all the Claude Code tokens you want, then you'll probably get better results from Sonnet. But if you already know enough programming to work around any issues that arise, the GLM models are quite usable. But you can't easily run GLM 4.5 Air quickly without professional workstation- or server-grade hardware (RTX 6000 Pro 96GB would be nice), at least not without a serious speed hit. Still, it's a very interesting sign for the future of open coding models.
- esafak 1y agoFor agentic coding I found the price difference more modest due to prompt caching, which most GLM providers on Openrouter don't offer, but Anthropic does. Look at the cache read/write columns: https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-4.5 https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-4.5
- magicalhippo 1y agoBeen playing with Grok Code Fast 1 in Cline via Open Router. It supports prompt caching as far as I can tell, and it certainly is cheap. It's been quite good for the stuff I've tried. YMMV.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 1y agoWhen it comes to "real-world development scenarios" they claim to be closer to Sonnet 4. This is the data for that claim: https://huggingface.co/datasets/zai-org/CC-Bench-trajectories https://huggingface.co/datasets/zai-org/CC-Bench-trajectorie...
- turingbook 1y agoActually Z.ai is a spinoff of Tsinghua University and one of the first China labs open sourcing its own large models (GLM released in 2021) . https://github.com/THUDM/GLM https://github.com/THUDM/GLM
- arjie 1y agoOkay, I'm going to try it, but why didn't you link the information on how to integrate it with Claude Code: https://docs.z.ai/scenario-example/develop-tools/claude https://docs.z.ai/scenario-example/develop-tools/claude Chinese software always has such a design language: - prepaid and then use credit to subscribe - strange serif font - that slider thing for captcha But I'm going to try it out now.
- vincirufus 1y agoAhh bugger I pasted the wrong link I had this one open in another tab..
- tonyhart7 1y agoI called it "chinnese chatpcha", back then chinnese chaptcha is so much harder than western counterpart but now gchaptcha spam me with 5 different image if I missing a tiles for crossroad, so chinnese chaptcha is much better in my opinion also there is variant that match the image based on shadow and different order of shape its much better in my opinion because its use much more interactivity, solving western chaptcha is so much mind numbing now that they require you at least multiple image identification for crossroad,sign,cars etc they want those self driving car are they
- awestroke 1y agoI assume both of the approaches are useless at actually stopping bots
- whatevermom 1y agoThey deter newbies but this is not a problem for experienced developers.
- varelse 1y ago[dead]
- Szpadel 1y agoyou can use any model with Claude code thanks to https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router but in my testing other models do not work well, looks like prompts are either very optimized for Claude, or other models are just not great yet with such agentic environment I was especially disappointed with grok code. it is very fast as advertised but in generating spaces and new lines in function calling until it hits max tokens. I wonder if that isn't why it gets so much tokens on openrouter. gpt-5 just wasn't using the tools very well I didn't tested glm yet, but with current anthropic subscription value, alternative would need to be very cheap if you consider daily use edit: I noticed that also have very inexpensive subscription https://z.ai/subscribe https://z.ai/subscribe, if they trained model to work well with CC this might actually be viable alternative
- steipete 1y agoBeen using that for a while, first Chinese model that works REALLY well! Also fascinating how they solved the issue that Claude expects a 200+k token model while GLM 4.5 has 128k.
- raincole 1y agoI wonder how you justify this editorialized title, and if HN mods share your justification. The linked article has no the word "killer" in it. I think this is why many people have concerns about AI. This group can't express neutral ideas. They have to hype about a simple official documentation page.
- vincirufus 1y agofeedback accepted got rid of the killer bits
- Jcampuzano2 1y agoHmm with the lower context length I'm wonder how it holds up for problems requiring slightly larger context given we know most models tend to degrade fairly quickly with context length. Maybe it's best for shorter tasks or condensed context? I find it interesting the number of models latching onto Claude codes harness. I'm still using Cursor for work and personal but tried out open code and Claude for a bit. I just miss having the checkpoints and whatnot.
- CuriouslyC 1y agohttps://fiction.live/stories/Fiction-liveBench-Feb-21-2025/oQdzQvKHw8JyXbN87 https://fiction.live/stories/Fiction-liveBench-Feb-21-2025/o...
- saretup 1y agoInteresting, although how hard is it to add a sorting functionality to the table?
- chisleu 1y agoI've been using GLM 4.5 and GLM 4.5 Air for a while now. The Air model is light enough to run on a macbook pro and is useful for Cline. I can run the full GLM model on my Mac Studio, but the TPS is so slow that it's only useful for chatting. So I hooked up with openrouter to try but didn't have the same success. Any of the open weight models I try with open router give sub standard results. I get better results from Qwen 3 coder 30b a3b locally than I get from Qwen 3 Coder 480b through open router. I'm really concerned that some of the providers are using quantized versions of the models so they can run more models per card and larger batches of inference.
- vincirufus 1y agoyeah I too have heard similar concerns with Open models on OpenRouter, but haven't been able to verify it, as I don't use that a lot
- numlocked 1y ago(OpenRouter COO here) We are starting to test this and verify the deployments. More to come on that front -- but long story short is that we don't have good evidence that providers are doing weird stuff that materially affects model accuracy. If you have data points to the contrary, we would love them. We are heavily incentivized to prioritize/make transparent high-quality inference and have no incentive to offer quantized/poorly-performing alternatives. We certainly hear plenty of anecdotal reports like this, but when we dig in we generally don't see it. An exception is when a model is first released -- for example this terrific work by artificial analysis: https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/1955102409044398415 https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/1955102409044398415 It does take providers time to learn how to run the models in a high quality way; my expectation is that the difference in quality will be (or already is) minimal over time. The large variance in that case was because GPT OSS had only been out for a couple of weeks. For well-established models, our (admittedly limited) testing has not revealed much variance between providers in terms of quality. There is some but it's not like we see a couple of providers 'cheating' by secretly quantizing and clearly serving less intelligence versions of the model. We're going to get more systematic about it though and perhaps will uncover some surprises.
- sergiotapia 1y agoUsed it to fix a couple of bugs just now in Elixir and it runs very fast, faster than Codex with GPT-5 medium or high. This is quite nice. Will try it out a bit longer over the weekend. I tested it using Claude Code with env variables overrides.
- cpursley 1y agoGood the hear it’s competent with Elixir! How would you compare it to Claude?
- zixuanlimit 1y ago[dead]
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- wuyuan 1y ago[dead]
- abrookewood 1y agoSo you can use Claude Code with other models? I had assumed that it was tied to your subscription and that was that.
- adastra22 1y agoIt is, but people figure out the Claude Code API and provide API compatible endpoints.
- sagarpatil 1y agoI was blown away by this model. It was definitely comparable to sonnet 4. In some of my tests, it performed as good as Opus. I subscribed to their paid plan, and now the model seems dumb? I asked it to find and replace a string. It only made the change in one file. Codex worked fine. Can Z.ai confirm if this is the model we get through their API or is it quantized for Claude Code use?
- KronisLV 1y agoThis is really cool and should work well with something like RooCode as well. Usually I keep going back to either Claude Sonnet or Gemini 2.5 Pro (also tried out GPT-5, was quite unimpressed) but both of those are relatively expensive. I've tried using the more expensive model for planning and something a bit cheaper for doing the bulk of changes (the Plan / Ask and Code modes in RooCode) which works pretty nicely, but settling on just one model like GLM 4.5 would be lovely! Closest to that I've gotten to up until now has been the Qwen3 Coder model on OpenRouter. I think I used about 40M tokens with Claude Sonnet last month, more on Gemini and others, that's a bit expensive for my liking.
- jedisct1 1y agoNot just Claude Code. Their plans $3 and $15 plans work even better with tools like Roo Code. After Claude models have recently become dumb, I switched to Qwen3-Coder (there's a very generous free tier) and GLM4.5, and I'm not looking back.
- faangguyindia 1y agoHow do you use qwen3 coder free tier?
- runze 1y agohttps://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/1953835877555151134 https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/1953835877555151134
- peepee1982 1y agoYou can install Qwen Code (the Gemini CLI fork) and use OAuth for authentication. That will give you 2000 free requests per day, no token limits. RooCode can use OAuth as well (but you have to install Qwen Code first).
- unsupp0rted 1y agoAnthropic can't compete with this on cost. They're probably bleeding money as it is. But they can sort of compete on model quality, by no longer dumbing down their models. That'll be expensive too, but it's a lever they have.
- aurareturn 1y agoOne of the articles posted here a week ago says Claude Code has about a ~20x margin on inference. So they can compete on cost if they want.
- unsupp0rted 1y agoIs Claude Code enterprise usage keeping the rest of the company afloat and able to keep raising?
- prmph 1y agoIt's weird, but using Claude Code (CC) with GLM 4.5 from Z.ai, I spent $5 just starting CC and asking it to read the spec and guideline files. This on an API that advertises $0.6 per million tokens input, and $2.2 per million tokens output. Then, I noticed that after the original prompt, any further prompt I gave CC (other that approving its actions) did not have any effect at all on it. Yes, any prompt is totally ignored. I have to stop CC and restart with the new prompt for it to take effect. This is really strange to me. Does CC have some way of detecting when it is running against an API other than Anthropic's? The massive cost and/or token usage and crippled agentic mode is clearly not due to GLM 4.5 not being capable. Either CC is crippled in some way when using a 3rd party API, or else Z.ai's API is somehow not working properly.
- conradev 1y agoThe graphs that some of these companies make are brutal: https://docs.z.ai/guides/llm/glm-4.5#higher-parameter-efficiency https://docs.z.ai/guides/llm/glm-4.5#higher-parameter-effici... "So, we only know the Y-axis for some models in the scatter plot. Let's make up an X-axis value on the bad side of the graph and include the data points anyway." Visually disingenuous!
- croemer 1y agoWhich x axis was made up? You mean showing barplots in descending order of scores?
- conradev 1y agoNo, the scatter plot on parameter efficiency! “Model Parameters (B)” has an “Unknown” column to the right of 1000, implying those models are 1200B or more parameters, which is just not the case. It renders the comparison useless, they can really only claim best efficiency against other open weight models.
- saretup 1y agoSurprised to see no one here is worried about privacy. Z.ai's privacy policy pretty much allows them to store and use prompts/code in a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sublicensable license to use and train their models.
- Alifatisk 1y agoI have already assumed that on every chat service I use, they store and train on my prompts either way, since I use the service for free. If you actually want privacy, host it yourself or look for a llm service with another business-model
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- Alifatisk 1y agoSomething I noted is that Z.ai is the first chat app that does not ask for feedback on each response. Don't they want it?
- mehdibl 1y agoCC system prompt is tuned for Sonnet 4/Opus Why trying CC why not using alternatives like Opencode or Goose that are open and made for this purpose instead of trying to use a tool tailored by Anthropic for Anthropic models?
- vitorgrs 1y agoIn my experience, Claude Code even being designed for Claude Models, still do much better than other CLI alternatives.
- anuramat 1y agoI guess "claude code but 20x cheaper" sells better; you can still use their subscription with other agents, just use their anthropic-compatible API
- exographicskip 1y agoWas thinking the same. opencode seems like a better dx for this kind of thing
- hamdingers 1y agoI have all the CC tokens I want at work and like the tool, but can't justify the cost at home for personal projects. I've been using it with DeepSeek to great effect, and just took GLM 4.5 for a Saturday morning test drive and early results are even better.
- SingAlong 1y agoBeen using this for two days now. Notes below: * This is an excellent alternative to Sonnet - which was my daily driver. I'm glad I tried GLM 4.5. You won't find any difference. * My context usage per session was about 50% with Sonnet earlier, but it fills up fast with GLM, and I hit 80-90% often. Could be the lower context size that is hurting. * Sonnet used to be very painful to work with as the context size goes beyond 80% (hence my habit of shorter conversations). GLM holds itself well even until the last bit of remaining context. Does not deviate from the assigned task.
- mkw2000 1y agoIs it just me or is the documentation for setting this up extremely unhelpful?
- lukaslalinsky 1y agoI've been trying this for a couple of weeks as a backup solution. The model is actually good, comparable to Sonnet 4. They has some issues with the API, but it seems fixed now. This is a good budget alternative to Claude.
- askmuhsin2 1y agoFor me the easiest approach of having both claude code and with GLM was to just create a separate alias for like `claude-z` something like ``` # file - ~/.claude-z-env export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic" export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="your_token" # file - ~/.bash_profile alias claude-z='source ~/.claude-z-env && claude' ``` Now I just run claude for normal stuff, claude-z when I want to use GLM 4.5.