Comment by lxe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lxe | Hacker News Reader

Is the actual Z.AI ecosystem good enough to replace the main drivers like Codex and Claude? Because it looks like Z Code is just a Codex fork. Just like the Kimi Code one is.

What irks me about this is that the harnesses seem to be just an afterthought here.

Don't get me wrong, I love messing around with installing Pi, getting it hooked up with OpenRouter, and just trying all kinds of different stuff, local models, etc... but when it comes to literally just setting up a productivity environment and trusting my entire machine with it, I just run Codex.

I have heard from anecdotes where people have indeed replaced their main drivers with DeepSek V4 Flash or GLM and state that "it's almost as good as... [claude/gpt]" but I never hear anyone say "yeah, this is the model/harness that I now run on my machine and don't mess with it"

> "yeah, this is the model/harness that I now run on my machine and don't mess with it"

* me raises hand.-

Their list of allowed tools is extensive so just use whatever you want within that list

Think z code gives a token bonus though

Both can be true though. I had the max coding plan since january and I kept using with Pi since then, even though it wasn’t as good as opus until glm 5.3. It definitely can be a daily driver if you don’t want to use Anthropic or OpenAI. It’s going to be even better with native vision now available. And i’m not messing with my setup either.

I use my own harness: https://github.com/computerex/z

Have been using it as my primary harness for personal work for I'd say 6 months. I recommend everyone create their own harness at least to learn. There are a lot of practical benefits.

I think my inexperience using Claude Code or Codex makes a difference but what would you expect to be different here as opposed to using pi or opencode? Pi is my main driver so switching between all these models is a no brainer. No matter what the model is, my harness stays the same: same workflow, same skills, etc.

I've recently started PI, and after installing a couple extensions + writing a couple more it became enough for me. All I need is just a plan mode, and I installed that.

You can use OpenRouter directly in Claude Code as well, it's quite nice!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com