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.
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!