I have been seeing a bit of hype around GLM 5.1 and its impressive benchmarks. So I got the lowest paid tier membership ($10) for z.ai, which provides an Anthropic-compatible API for GLM models. My thinking: it could serve as a backup when I hit usage limits and a place to offload tasks like code reviews.
Setup
I decided to just ask Claude to read through the z.ai docs on how to connect Claude Code to the GLM models. While this got us to a point where I could use GLM, the setup was not ideal because writing to settings.json impacts all sessions, or a local settings.json impacts all the sessions in that directory. I wanted something on a per-session basis. It turns out you can basically do the same thing with just environment variables. To make it a bit more convenient, I wrote a simple wrapper for my “z.ai claude”
~/.config/claude-providers/zai.env:
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN={z.ai api token}
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic
export API_TIMEOUT_MS=3000000
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL=glm-5.1
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL=glm-4.7
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL=glm-4.5-air
cz script on path
#!/bin/bash
source ~/.config/claude-providers/zai.env
exec claude "$@"
Now I can invoke my GLM version of Claude with cz. And since the env vars are scoped to the process, I can run cz and claude side by side in separate terminals.
Tracking Usage
The last piece, I’ve been using my own variation of kamranahmedse/claude-statusline. So I asked Claude to look at the z.ai usage api and append its usage to the status line. After a little back and forth on text alignment and caching, we got it settled.
And since I’ve been having issues with multi-line status lines disappearing in the Claude Code interface intermittently, I threw it into a /limits command as well.
Quirks
There are some quirks to using the non-Anthropic models with Claude such as /voice not being available and WebSearch not working. Swapping between providers mid-session also seems to just cause errors from the provider. I’m sure there’s a ton more that I’ll come across. I’ve really only used it for about an hour at this point.
The next piece I will probably explore and write about is invoking cz as a tool from an “Anthropic” session.
If you are interested in the cz and limits scripts, you can find them in vinnybod/blog-examples.