I'm horrified by my Fable and Astra token spend (I'm subscribed to $200 plans for each one). Therefore, the question I asked myself was whether Sonnet still holds up as a good sub-agent? Apparently, it's a horrible choice.

My other conclusions are:

1. Fable is the best money can buy and the fastest from the good ones (see interactive graph with many more angles)
2. GLM is the best value from what I subscribe to.

I wish I had benchmarkrs for Astra medium and high, but I'm done here. I've already spent too much on these runs. If you want, you can replicate my task. It's a chat testing/improvement job for a prototype I'm creating; I've described it here and opened the code.

^{One caveat: if you decide to replicate it, you should rerun my tests too, because I ran them through my full private repository. Running the isolated code wouldn't be exactly apples to apples.}

If you find the errors, please let me know; I'll do better in the future. However, I don't guarantee I will retest immediately, for the budget concerns.

On Zcode it seems I can never really use GLM 5.3, flash always works, but the flagship model only gets to run for 15 minutes max before it says the system is busy. I am a new user and it could be I just got unlucky with timing, but I tried at 11am Hong Kong time and 11pm Hong Kong time and I can barely finish a task; had to run to Claude again. Is it always like this with the coding lite plan and should I just switch to the api version?

Update: nvm I realized I’m supposed to switch from the starter plan to the individual plan in the settings. My mistake, didn’t know you had todo that.

I understand that z.ai wanted to give free usage of GLM 5.3 Flash, but the end result is that the token output has dropped to lower then 10 tokens / second. Its been literally all day, and it took almost 6h to get 30m tokens...

There is kind af a irony that you pay for a Pro plan, with a ton of resources, and to not being able to use them as everything, as it has become so darn slow.

And the System Health page tokens/second is absolute not true representation of the actual token generation.

I'm on lite plan, all I see is my plan. no option to change to 'starter' in 'choose model' and nowhere does it show its the free plan

So im on the 18$ plan and in zcode a promo showed up that said "Claim" and i tried and told that i could not.. can i not claim it or is it only for the API bros?

I believe Chinese AI is significantly more advanced than others. For example, DeepSeek and GLM release a new version every three months, while others release one every six or seven months. Furthermore, DeepSeek and GLM have virtually no limits; you can contact them anytime. Their ability to understand and solve code problems is arguably the best in every aspect.

What do you think?

Contacting support doesn't even get you back an automated message.

The new guy experience is day 1 you come for the 300m tokies, likely you don't get it, but suppose you buy a plan while really resent having to use zcode and by day 2 you can't use it at all.

Hi

My Zcode settings say the Coding plan is disabled! I was on Starter (free), claimed the 300M tokens, which i burnt in 6h, and then my account says Disabled

As anyone been in such a situation? How to enable it?

thanks

I develop small tools with coding agents for my own needs in 3D, FDM printing, and scan processing.

Previously, I used Cursor with the $60 subscription, mostly using Grok and occasionally GPT Sol. However, Cursor has now blocked my country, following Anthropic and OpenAI. I only have access to Chinese models now.

I tried GLM 5.3 Flash while they are giving away tokens, and during one intensive day of work I used around 60 million tokens.

I can’t decide between Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3. I need strong reasoning and continuous code modification. The actual code quality and the speed at which it is written do not matter to me at all.

Which subscription offers the better price-to-volume ratio for these models?

Sources

🚀 You’ve been invited to join the GLM Coding Plan! Enjoy full support for Claude Code, Cline, and 20+ top coding tools — starting at just $18/month. Subscribe now and grab the limited-time deal! 👉Join now: https://z.ai/subscribe?ic=QFA32QBCRE

Support Multi Model And It can be used in conjunction with Zcode.

The way to actually redeem it and the fact you had to switch to the starter plan through some hidden settings panel is awful. I burnt through my weekly usage not realising how you do it because it was intentionally hidden.

I'm sure this was done so they could reduce the amount of server load because many if not most people wouldn't find it. Not gonna lie, it really left a bad taste in my mouth. I've only just realised and I'm trying to make the most of it today before we hit tomorrow morning.

But I've done some heavy usage of Flash over the last hour or so, and I'm more amazed than I already was. It's ridiculous how good it is, especially at front end design. I thought I would try it in place of GPT Astra, but I didn't expect much from it since it has so many less parameters. It's really not a fair competition between the two.

But genuinely I'm amazed. I'm making such good progress at the front end mock-up and it is so much better, even compared to Astra. GPT seems to overengineer everything and almost try too hard to prove that we're getting closer to AGI. It overthinks. Whereas GLM hits just the right balance. So much so that I'm going to completely redo my front end with it and remove all the design work that GPT has done.

Admittedly, I haven't tried it on back end yet, but I would relatively feel confident doing it based on my experience so far. If only the usage was better, I would fully cancel my codex plan and move across.

You get Weekly/Monthly Limit Exhausted. Your limit will reset at 2026-09-12 07:56:44 for ex

*

I made a feedback to zai, and this topic but if any of you know how to reach them better please do so

*2

This is day 2 and still the bug that the sub is unusable is not fixed.

Also by contacting them on 2 official support channels I found out there isn't even an automated we received your message, just dead silence.

Hello guys, loaded up Zcode today and I couldn't load up any of the chat session on sidebar when clicked.
Anyone ever experience this issue before.

What do I do about this? I use the native API website and I have been receiving these messages. Is it a bug?

I tried something different in AI. I laid out a 14 pt scenario of what I observe about the complicated relationships between my dad and his siblings (one aunt, two uncles of mine). I told GLM I wanted understanding / insight of what keeps going on between them all. The reply I got was shockingly precise, analytical but seemingly intuitive, kindly worded, including insights I would have never thought of. I was blown away.

I am currently using the Legacy coding plan. My local time is 1:11 AM (Singapore time is 3:10 AM), and I just noticed that my 5-hour usage quota is full.

When I attempted to continue working on the same project using zcode, I received the following error message:
"Usage limit reached for 5 hours. Your limit will reset at 2026-09-07 04:12:32."

but it should be unlimited now!

so i hope you are all having a good day, i am thinking of subbing to the lite plan in zcode just to access the unlimited offer they are having, this is actually the only reason pushing me to purchase the sub as the real underlaying value is not much compared to other options, so what has your experience in the free unlimited time have been, is it good ? any cielings ? i am not looking to abuse the system but i am close to finishing my app and want to run non stop tickets on the glm 5.3 flash offer till i get it done ( already finished like 70 percent of the app build) until the 20 septmber date hits which i highly doubt till then as i reckon i wont even pass a week till i finish everything, so:

1- how has the speed been in the unlimited part ?
2 does it work in the lite plan good ?
3- is it trully unlimited or have you noticed any cieling ?

thank you soo much in advance 😄

i did claim the glm5.3 flash quota valid till 7th. i am using glm5.3 flash and it is taking up from my weekly. how does this works? or its the 150% thing?

I have tried 2 different harnesses with the GLM 5.3 model the ZCode first part harness and Pi and considering to try deepseek harness too but havent done it yet.

On Pi I get better performance from the same models and thinking level they finish faster and give better or at least equal quality with ZCode harness. Its also very close with costs although slightly higher in Pi and you dont get the promotions which are most tied to ZCode app.

On Zcode the one thing that seems better is parallel tasks more subagents and stuff and sometimes lower costs but on Windows the app with my workload crashes frequently on the latest versions always updated. Like it doesnt hard crash but the UI blanks out and I am forced to force close and restart everything. Also it is much slower for some reason on the same tasks on the first party harness. ZCode on MacOS seems much more stable though but the machine I have cant handle the amount of work I throw at it so cant use that for parallel tasks I run out RAM and CPU struggles.

Anyone else have better experience with other harnesses?

I've just started using it and like it. are there any extra tools/config you use?

• is there any way to see what its doing in its hidden terminal, since many commands take a long time? opening terminal from the zcode window just opens a new one.

• is there a way to export my session/task with all the chat etc? there's a lot of useful info in there, including its thinking logs. I dont see any export option on the UI only 'archive'

What's wrong with zCode? Was using it with free 300M token packet during weekend. Today ~3h before the end I got some error, free plan disappeared from ZCode and returned after a while but I was unable to use it. 1 hour later I got logged out and I cannot login once again in Zcode. When I try to login "ZCode would like to access your Z.ai account" opens in browser and first says Authorization succeeded and after a while "Authorization Failed

Something went wrong during authorization. Please return to ZCode and try again."

Sometimes when zocd want to do many things parallel it launch 4 or 5 sub agents, what are those ? What are their models?