Honestly, I'm loving it! I've been building V.E.L.O.C.I.T.Y. IDE and it didnt just help me build out the entire agentic browser (from scratch), but using their system made me realize just how 'stupid' the go-to agentic IDEs are. Seriously, the fact they built in codebase analysis with patch generating and an entire Wikis generator. It made me expand the scope of velocity to include those. Cuz a wikis tied to a merkle root site-map as agent context means it's a VC system that tracks state, not just code. The codebase analysis, while they use AI to do most of the analysis, you can see they have a pretty solid setup for pattern detection that isnt inherent to a model. They did a really good job with it and it blows my mind the more I use it. For perspective, Lite mode, I've now pushed close to 100k LOC through it, that's 10s of millions of tokens... For free, on an unpaid account, without ever hitting 'high traffic' or 'fair-usage' blocks. It just works and it works well... Writing Rust isnt easy and it's doing a phenomenal job. It's faster and smarter than Gemini 3.6 flash, that's something I can confidently say.
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series — ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 15yr QA → building AI test framework.
Maybe you could also give DevEco Code by Huawei a try — GLM 5.1 is free to use, up to 50 requests per minute. Not sure if there'd be any network restrictions on your end though.
Download started. Thanks for the headsup! Though it seems to lean heavily on HarmonyOS, is it OS restrictive in terms of what platform it can build for?
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series — ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 15yr QA → building AI test framework.
Nah, you're good. The CLI tool (npm install -g @deveco/deveco-code) works as a standalone AI coding assistant — GLM-5.1 is built-in, free, unlimited, 50 req/min. No HarmonyOS toolchain required to use the AI features.
The HarmonyOS lock-in is only for the full IDE (DevEco Studio) when you need to compile, debug, or run on actual devices. But if you just want to try GLM-5.1 for coding, the CLI alone does the job. Worth a shot since it's literally free 😏
And you've been gatekeeping this all this time why? That's incredible! I'm definitely gunna give it a run and see what it can do. Honestly Qoder was the turning point for me... The Cloudflare Workers AI hook I built for Kimi K2.7 was a good experiment, but it started me down the rabbit hole of exploring Eastern models more and IDEs too, usually it's a bit iffy, cuz of the language barrier and some models being trained almost explicitly on Chinese and it tends to through characters out mid session (surprisingly though, none more than Google's Gemini... Odd...). But Qoder and just the features they built in, like the Wikis and knowledge cards. I've been exploring it a bit and honestly, I can see why the East is winning the AI race... While Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, Claude, Copilot all fight for user-base, they do it by doing a few token refreshes, or giving you the 'privilege' of using their most expensive model on a subscription you pay for, at the rate it's charged at... Vs Qoder actually adds useful features AND freebies and the models supported are cheaper in general. I signed a sub today for Qoder, fact that the wikis and knowledge cards stay up to date is a game-changer, cuz that's persisted doesnt matter what model you use and it just works. But Imma give DevEco a try, GLM 5.1 for free sounds like it can be pretty useful.
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series — ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 15yr QA → building AI test framework.
Honestly, it's mostly an information gap. There's a certain level of hostility toward Chinese models internationally. The reason I never mentioned it before is that I assumed everyone already knew about this stuff — but it turns out only we know about it. Over here, there are just too many AI companies popping up everywhere — models, freebies, giveaways, everything is comfortable. AI services are basically becoming infrastructure here. Like the model I use the most right now — DeepSeek V4 Flash.
For comparison, DeepSeek V4 Flash costs $0.14 per 1M input tokens and $0.28 per 1M output tokens. Cache hits? $0.0028 per 1M tokens — basically free. Claude Opus 4.5 charges ~$15 input and ~$75 output per 1M tokens. That's roughly 100x more expensive.
And Flash supports 1M context, tool calling, and thinking mode. So yeah, the price is really nice — makes you wonder what the West is charging for 😏
It really is an information gap. Search top 10 Agentic IDEs, or Top 10 most efficient Agentic IDEs. You see 10 different western copy-paste solutions. Not a single 1 from the East. Admittedly it really does depend on where you operate, regions like the EU have data-compliance laws (specifically to isolate the market and boost local LLM usage and growth), eg. if you want to process financial documents, it cant leave the region. I did look into DeepSeek when I was building the IDE originally, cuz the cost effectiveness is just unmatched for raw API cost. Honestly, the western companies are charging a premium for 'SOTA' when reality is, they havent been a step ahead for a while... Kimi K2.7 Code already bridged the gap at 1T params, now with Qwen and Kimi's new models, that gap flipped to where the Eastern models are faster, smarter and open weights... But why support a chinese company, when you can push Meta's Llama, who wont even disclose what they used to train it with... Western companies are likely sitting at a 90%+ Profit margin, while the Eastern companies are sitting at a modest 20%, but the difference for developers is you dont break the bank getting a real amount of work done. I made the switch officially, I sub'd to Qoder yesterday to really test the platform out, see how expensive the Generate Wikis maintenance is, etc. It reset Lite usage cap, so it's cost me a total of 80c sofar between Qwen Max and Wikis. For comparison, You cant even generate a single file with Haiku for that...
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series — ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 15yr QA → building AI test framework.
The thing that really peeves me off, is the fact that everyone wholeheartedly agree that Qwen's tiny models are astonishing and the go-to for any local LLM needs... Yet they only advertise HuggingFace for downloading it for local inference, they never mention Alibaba Cloud, or Qoder. It really feels like the information gap is intentional to gatekeep and prevent people from realizing that the Chinese models are cheaper, faster, smarter. Or even infrastructure wise. Look at Antigravity, the times I've used it, it's a buggy mess. You give a command, switch to a different task and the entire app freezes, need to close it and reopen. I havent had a single hiccup with Qoder, sure it'll get slow when you really hammer it, but it gets slow, not crippled and broken. Which means it's foundationally built better, with better failover and async guarding to make sure it recovers from errors, not crash. That's not something you can retroactively implement, that's a design choice from the start and it'll take Google with all their money over a year to achieve and they'd have to release it as a V3, instead of a patch...
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series — ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 15yr QA → building AI test framework.
qoder.com for me, kimi.com for me, other than that, rest of links pass. Thank you very much!
Yeah and this from Africa. China has actually had quite alot to do my country, including being the providers of the only road that hasnt had a single pothole in the past 10 years 🤣 meanwhile my government puts speedbumps on a highway... (true story, search it up, Namibia B1 speedbumps)
I'll definitely look into all of these, thank you very much. Cuz I am honestly sick and tired of how expensive AI has gotten and how pathetic western models and IDEs are at completing a full task. Case in point, a manufacturing system, standard BOM and WO, I spend 3 hours troubleshooting why Claude Fable (the golden child apparently), decided to mess why my formulas. Cuz I run under the assumption I missed something, so I have to validate why it made the choice and whether I was wrong... I wasnt, it just falls apart at anything more complex than 'make me a cyberpunk landing page for my website'...
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series — ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 15yr QA → building AI test framework.
Honestly, I'm loving it! I've been building V.E.L.O.C.I.T.Y. IDE and it didnt just help me build out the entire agentic browser (from scratch), but using their system made me realize just how 'stupid' the go-to agentic IDEs are. Seriously, the fact they built in codebase analysis with patch generating and an entire Wikis generator. It made me expand the scope of velocity to include those. Cuz a wikis tied to a merkle root site-map as agent context means it's a VC system that tracks state, not just code. The codebase analysis, while they use AI to do most of the analysis, you can see they have a pretty solid setup for pattern detection that isnt inherent to a model. They did a really good job with it and it blows my mind the more I use it. For perspective, Lite mode, I've now pushed close to 100k LOC through it, that's 10s of millions of tokens... For free, on an unpaid account, without ever hitting 'high traffic' or 'fair-usage' blocks. It just works and it works well... Writing Rust isnt easy and it's doing a phenomenal job. It's faster and smarter than Gemini 3.6 flash, that's something I can confidently say.
Maybe you could also give DevEco Code by Huawei a try — GLM 5.1 is free to use, up to 50 requests per minute. Not sure if there'd be any network restrictions on your end though.
Download started. Thanks for the headsup! Though it seems to lean heavily on HarmonyOS, is it OS restrictive in terms of what platform it can build for?
Nah, you're good. The CLI tool (npm install -g @deveco/deveco-code) works as a standalone AI coding assistant — GLM-5.1 is built-in, free, unlimited, 50 req/min. No HarmonyOS toolchain required to use the AI features.
The HarmonyOS lock-in is only for the full IDE (DevEco Studio) when you need to compile, debug, or run on actual devices. But if you just want to try GLM-5.1 for coding, the CLI alone does the job. Worth a shot since it's literally free 😏
And you've been gatekeeping this all this time why? That's incredible! I'm definitely gunna give it a run and see what it can do. Honestly Qoder was the turning point for me... The Cloudflare Workers AI hook I built for Kimi K2.7 was a good experiment, but it started me down the rabbit hole of exploring Eastern models more and IDEs too, usually it's a bit iffy, cuz of the language barrier and some models being trained almost explicitly on Chinese and it tends to through characters out mid session (surprisingly though, none more than Google's Gemini... Odd...). But Qoder and just the features they built in, like the Wikis and knowledge cards. I've been exploring it a bit and honestly, I can see why the East is winning the AI race... While Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, Claude, Copilot all fight for user-base, they do it by doing a few token refreshes, or giving you the 'privilege' of using their most expensive model on a subscription you pay for, at the rate it's charged at... Vs Qoder actually adds useful features AND freebies and the models supported are cheaper in general. I signed a sub today for Qoder, fact that the wikis and knowledge cards stay up to date is a game-changer, cuz that's persisted doesnt matter what model you use and it just works. But Imma give DevEco a try, GLM 5.1 for free sounds like it can be pretty useful.
Honestly, it's mostly an information gap. There's a certain level of hostility toward Chinese models internationally. The reason I never mentioned it before is that I assumed everyone already knew about this stuff — but it turns out only we know about it. Over here, there are just too many AI companies popping up everywhere — models, freebies, giveaways, everything is comfortable. AI services are basically becoming infrastructure here. Like the model I use the most right now — DeepSeek V4 Flash.
For comparison, DeepSeek V4 Flash costs $0.14 per 1M input tokens and $0.28 per 1M output tokens. Cache hits? $0.0028 per 1M tokens — basically free. Claude Opus 4.5 charges ~$15 input and ~$75 output per 1M tokens. That's roughly 100x more expensive.
And Flash supports 1M context, tool calling, and thinking mode. So yeah, the price is really nice — makes you wonder what the West is charging for 😏
It really is an information gap. Search top 10 Agentic IDEs, or Top 10 most efficient Agentic IDEs. You see 10 different western copy-paste solutions. Not a single 1 from the East. Admittedly it really does depend on where you operate, regions like the EU have data-compliance laws (specifically to isolate the market and boost local LLM usage and growth), eg. if you want to process financial documents, it cant leave the region. I did look into DeepSeek when I was building the IDE originally, cuz the cost effectiveness is just unmatched for raw API cost. Honestly, the western companies are charging a premium for 'SOTA' when reality is, they havent been a step ahead for a while... Kimi K2.7 Code already bridged the gap at 1T params, now with Qwen and Kimi's new models, that gap flipped to where the Eastern models are faster, smarter and open weights... But why support a chinese company, when you can push Meta's Llama, who wont even disclose what they used to train it with... Western companies are likely sitting at a 90%+ Profit margin, while the Eastern companies are sitting at a modest 20%, but the difference for developers is you dont break the bank getting a real amount of work done. I made the switch officially, I sub'd to Qoder yesterday to really test the platform out, see how expensive the Generate Wikis maintenance is, etc. It reset Lite usage cap, so it's cost me a total of 80c sofar between Qwen Max and Wikis. For comparison, You cant even generate a single file with Haiku for that...
Haha, if you ever come to China, KFC's on me anytime 😄
The thing that really peeves me off, is the fact that everyone wholeheartedly agree that Qwen's tiny models are astonishing and the go-to for any local LLM needs... Yet they only advertise HuggingFace for downloading it for local inference, they never mention Alibaba Cloud, or Qoder. It really feels like the information gap is intentional to gatekeep and prevent people from realizing that the Chinese models are cheaper, faster, smarter. Or even infrastructure wise. Look at Antigravity, the times I've used it, it's a buggy mess. You give a command, switch to a different task and the entire app freezes, need to close it and reopen. I havent had a single hiccup with Qoder, sure it'll get slow when you really hammer it, but it gets slow, not crippled and broken. Which means it's foundationally built better, with better failover and async guarding to make sure it recovers from errors, not crash. That's not something you can retroactively implement, that's a design choice from the start and it'll take Google with all their money over a year to achieve and they'd have to release it as a V3, instead of a patch...
🤣 Bet!
Alright, I'll share what I know. Here's a list of Chinese cloud AI platforms — whether you can access them depends on your network:
Alibaba Cloud — Qwen / Tongyi: tongyi.aliyun.com/
Qoder (the one you mentioned): qoder.cloud/
Baidu — ERNIE Bot: yiyan.baidu.com/
Tencent Cloud — Hunyuan: cloud.tencent.com/product/hunyuan
ByteDance Volcano Engine — Doubao: volcengine.com/product/doubao
Huawei Cloud — Pangu: huaweicloud.com/product/pangu.html
DeepSeek: platform.deepseek.com/
Moonshot AI — Kimi: kimi.moonshot.cn/
Zhipu AI — GLM / ChatGLM: open.bigmodel.cn/
01.AI — Yi: lingyiwanwu.com/
Baichuan AI: baichuan-ai.com/
iFlytek — Spark: xinghuo.xfyun.cn/
MiniMax: minimaxi.com/
SiliconFlow (unified API): cloud.siliconflow.cn/
Hope your network holds up. Take your time exploring the free tiers. I used to think the Western internet was all about "freedom" — guess it's not quite what they advertise, huh 😏
qoder.com for me, kimi.com for me, other than that, rest of links pass. Thank you very much!
Yeah and this from Africa. China has actually had quite alot to do my country, including being the providers of the only road that hasnt had a single pothole in the past 10 years 🤣 meanwhile my government puts speedbumps on a highway... (true story, search it up, Namibia B1 speedbumps)
I'll definitely look into all of these, thank you very much. Cuz I am honestly sick and tired of how expensive AI has gotten and how pathetic western models and IDEs are at completing a full task. Case in point, a manufacturing system, standard BOM and WO, I spend 3 hours troubleshooting why Claude Fable (the golden child apparently), decided to mess why my formulas. Cuz I run under the assumption I missed something, so I have to validate why it made the choice and whether I was wrong... I wasnt, it just falls apart at anything more complex than 'make me a cyberpunk landing page for my website'...
Here's an updated list — added the ones I missed, including international URLs that might be more accessible:
Already works for you:
• Qoder: qoder.cloud/ ✅
• Kimi (Moonshot AI): kimi.moonshot.cn/ ✅
Global-friendly / should work:
• DeepSeek: platform.deepseek.com/ (fully global)
• Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (Qwen): alibabacloud.com/product/model-studio
• Zhipu AI (GLM / ChatGLM): open.bigmodel.cn/
• MiniMax: minimaxi.com/
• 01.AI (Yi): lingyiwanwu.com/
May need a workaround (your network situation varies):
• Baidu ERNIE Bot: yiyan.baidu.com/
• Tencent Hunyuan: cloud.tencent.com/product/hunyuan
• ByteDance Doubao: volcengine.com/product/doubao
• Huawei Cloud Pangu: huaweicloud.com/intl/product/pangu...
• Baichuan AI: baichuan-ai.com/
• iFlytek Spark: xinghuo.xfyun.cn/
• SiliconFlow (unified API): cloud.siliconflow.cn/
Bonus — open models you can run locally (HuggingFace / Ollama):
• Qwen2.5 (72B)
• DeepSeek V4
• GLM-4-9B
• Yi-1.5
• MiniMax-01
Most of these have free tiers that'll give you more tokens than Claude's entire paid plan 😂 Happy exploring!
Thank you very much! I will definitely be exploring them all and testing them out!