Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

I have been using Z.ai's (creators of GLM) "Coding Plan" with GLM-4.6. $3/month and 3x higher limits than Claude Pro, they say.

(I have both and haven't run into any limits yet, so I'm probably not a very heavy user.)

I'm quite impressed with the model. I have been using GLM-4.6 in Claude Code instead of Sonnet, and finding it fine for my use cases. (Simple scripting and web stuff.)

(Note: Z.ai's GLM doesn't seem to support web search (fails) or image recognition (hallucinates). To fix that I use Claude Code Router and hooked up those two features to Gemini (free) instead.)

I find that Sonnet produces much nicer code. I often find myself asking Sonnet to clean up GLM's code. More recently, I just got the Pro plan for Claude so I'm mostly just using Sonnet directly now. (Haven't had the rate limits yet but we'll see!)

So in my experience if you're not too fussy you can currently get "80% of Claude Code" for like $3/month, which is pretty nuts.

GLM also works well in Charm Crush, though it seems to be better optimized for Claude Code (I think they might have fine tuned it.)

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I have tested Kimi K2 at 1000 tok/s via OpenRouter, and it's bloody amazing, so I imagine this supercharged GLM will be great too. Alas, $50!

I just asked glm-4.6 how to setup a z.ai api key with claude code and it kept on saying it has no idea what claude code is...

Quite funny, actually.

Ask and you shall receive!

https://docs.z.ai/devpack/tool/claude

tldr

    "env": {
        "ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN": "your_zai_api_key",
        "ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic"
    }

Although if you want an Actually Good Experience I recommend using Claude Code Router

https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router

because it allows you to intercept the requests and forward them to other models. (e.g. GLM doesn't seem to support search or images, so I use Gemini's free tier for that.)

(CCR just launches Claude with the base url set to a local proxy. The more adventurous reader can also set up his own proxy... :)

Benchmark score

Humans : 1

AI : 0

Does this allow me to use Claude Code as the orchestration harness with GLM 4.6 as the LLM along with other LLMs? Seems so based on your description, thanks for the link.

Explain like I'm 5?

The Pro and Max plans for z.ai+GLM provides an MCP that does image.

actually the web search/image needs the higher tier subscription with their mcp. k gladly paid for it, i basically don't care about usage anymore. it's great at execution. i still find it not so great at planning though. i wish i can use api sonnet/codex for planning and glm on claude code for executing easily, with codex/claude code. best thing right now is kilo code with the orchestrator but haven't tried it.

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