They learned nothing from the Grok Code saga.

If anything, that should have been a learning lesson to NOT trust harnesses, especially new ones.

Hold on, what happened with grok?

That’s explains the 300 million of tokens on the weekend only if you use their tool.

Ohhh no another one found that agents don’t actually run locally. We already had the “grok uploads all my stuff to Google cloud bucket” news…

next I can’t wait to see news about “ai company is using my data without my consent” as well.

Closed source agents are a red flag no matter if its China or America. Always use an open harness with a good reputation and enough users that someone will notice if they push malicious code like this one here. Right now that's Opencode and Pi.

I wouldn't list Opencode as "good reputation".

They had their own unbound "harness scans the whole user directory" oopsie and handled concerns about that by introducing code signing.

Which, yes, does have absolutely nothing to do with that issue.

I guess by now it is better, but to me they seem to lack the engineering culture necessary for a "good reputation" stamp.

__

Ref: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/14925#issuecomm...

among other issues.

Their reputation is “bad” but not because of privacy concerns. I personally think they’re trustworthy

We use opencode with self hosted llm for privacy reasons. Good, right? Well, no, because opencode by default uses a "free" cloud model to summarize all chats even if a different model was configured as the main one.

I wonder how many opencode users upload their private secrets to the cloud, while thinking they're using a self hosted model.

Btw. I don't think this is malicious, just sloppy.

How about the one where if you start a session outside of a Git repository, the "worktree root" is set to /. Bug report closed as "not planned".

FWIW, I don't think that they're being malicious. They instead just seem to have no idea nor do they care.

And the original comment I've replied to proves this strategy right! So from a business standpoint: excellent work.

Glad my arbitrary failure to try them has worked out! For people seeking OS-native harnesses, I can recommend Factory's Droid. I know I'll be returning to it with my head hung low today, after I uninstall ZCode.

It does have a "mission" feature that's stuck in the strange, distant times of 2025 by way overdoing mandatory verification steps, which means they don't support swarms/workflows/crews/fleets yet -- that is, it's all done in sequence. But they have the boring, corporate engineering attitude that I think we're are all craving rn, and generally seem competent.

I can heartily dis-recommend Vix, even though they gamed themselves to the top of at least one ranking site that shall not be named; exactly like the quasi-bad-faith incompetence described with OpenCode above, but without even the "Open-" branding! Though perhaps that word has been so thoroughly burnt as a prefix by Sam Altman & Microsoft's criminal behavior that we should let it go...

Is this how "FLOSS" wins over "OSS"? Not with an ideological bang, but with a marketing issue?

Is this how "FLOSS" wins over "OSS"? Not with an ideological bang, but with a marketing issue?

Nah, I don't think so. Also, we arguably do not want FLOSS to "win" over OSS, because that just means people with no taste or sense cluttering up the repos, issues and support chats.

"Open" being used as a signal for non-hacker people was a weird and unpleasant development, but, if you think about it, it might be a blessing in disguise and shall keep them away from the more pleasant spaces.

It's not that they'd care about being scammed, mistreated and rug-pulled anyway. They want that. They do it themselves all the time. Every time they encounter a space that treats them well, they terraform it into baseline miserable-ness.

So let them have the "Open" prefix. It's just words, anyway.

This is kinda beside the point and this whole thread may be wiped when dang wakes up and notices the AI slop article we're commending under, but your reply is thought provoking so I'll attempt a response anyway;

I'm sure you're far more experienced than I with basically every aspect of this discussion, but I'd argue that's given you a blindspot, here. I'll hit some specifics below, but the headline is that you're effectively taking a stand against Eternal September II -- a goal that I hope we can all agree would be quixotically antisocial, given what followed the first one!

  we arguably do not want FLOSS to "win" over OSS

I think(/hope) that fellow FLOSS proponents would passionately disagree. FLOSS isn't a brand of chatroom, nor even merely a community: it's an ethos regarding labor, property, and liberty. Demanding that all users of your software are also activists for your particular take on intellectual property is clearly a doomed undertaking for anything beyond a toy or library, anyway.

Didn't you get into this stuff to change the world? To liberate the oppressed, undereducated, and forgotten with the radical power of the information superhighway? Cause it reads here like you're more motivated by selfishness (not wanting to bother talking to people with less expertise than you) and resentment. On that note...

  They want that. They do it themselves all the time.

Here you equate "non-hacker people" with software engineers you don't agree with, it seems. You're ofc welcome to think companies X Y & Z produce "miserable-ness", but as absurd as it sounds, it sure seems like you've forgotten the fact that some users are not developers. Many, in fact! Over 99%, even!

Less confrontationally; my mom is in her late 60s, and is pretty computer-literate for her age after decades of knowledge work. Surely you'd agree that she's not, like, evil for using OSX, iOS, GMail, Word, etc.? That she didn't chose those things because of a philosophical commitment to defending IP laws, but rather because of structural reasons? Even if she were pro-IP, wouldn't we want to win good, well-meaning people to our side?

  So let them have the "Open" prefix. It's just words, anyway.

I do agree with this still, but as a philosopher I just have to say that everything is just words. It's language games, in fact! Which is why I simply had to reply.

I hope none of the above was rude; I'm trying hard to keep my passion for this topic from pushing me past HN guidelines :)

Lots of modern software plays it loose with privacy, but this IMO crossing a second line: doing so with zero notification whatsoever, in a massively intrusive way, against data that is almost certainly private and possibly illegal to exfiltrate, with no obvious way to turn it off.

That crosses into outright malware.

Makes me not want to use GLM or other Z.ai models either, since who knows what interesting easter eggs are embedded in their training data.

You know... (puts on foil hat)... I did notice that Z is also the weird Russian logo for their invasion of Ukraine and Russia and China have cooperated to some degree (or at least China is helping Russia in exchange for access to resources). I dismissed this when I first thought of it, but I will now leave it here. Still probably coincidence but my Bayesian priors were just updated in its direction very slightly.

How do you know this is not true with other vendors? I'm not defending them but I wouldn't believe anyone in this business unconditionally. Anthropic agent fwiw is not open source, gemini and codex are.

WOW. I actually did buy a month of GLM because GLM-5.3-Flash is so great and ZCode is honestly one of the best harnesses out there from an HCI perspective, and I won't lie, this is pretty gutting. I guess this settles my inner turmoil about open-sourcing my cAI research, at least...

With that personal failing in mind, I'd ask y'all to permit me to toe the guidelines just once, to proffer a hearty nyah nyah told ya so on a comment thread that spawned ~a dozen disagreeing replies this week! More seriously, I think this[1] is highly-relevant, shockingly-underreported context about the extent to which four PRC companies --Z, Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot-- are acting in bad faith. Consider it testimony as to their character, just in case anyone is thinking this might just be a simple misunderstanding.

So... nyah nyah, told us so:

In the PRC, they[1] leaked tons of national secrets on the PRC's latest AI campaigns, the inner workings of their "opinion monitoring" (read: performative panopticon) and "stability" (read: violent oppression) departments, Chengdu's whole CCTV network, direct-energy weapons plans, espionage activities in Syria to hunt down Uyghur refugees, and god knows what else that Anthropic didn't divulge to us common folk.

In the US, it's very clearly an attempt to rip off a competitor. I'm not sure how else you could possibly see it. Even if you're a distillation fan in general (which A. why and B. plz don't), they did this through a network of Japanese and Signaporean shell accounts, presumably at least some of which were abusing Anthropic's subscription service in a ToS double-whammy, as it would be exorbitantly expensive otherwise. They also had to hack around Anthropic's API to get CoT traces, which seems impossible to explain away as anything innocent.

I've been beating the "China isn't necessarily an enemy, it's gonna take us all to handle AI" drum for literally years, but this attack was just... gross. Gross in scale and gross in arrogance. Not a good sign for the dawning alignment crisis, to say the least :(

TL;DR: Use these services if you want, but know that you're supporting aggressive escalations and companies that very clearly don't give a flying fuck about violating the law, much less your ToS. So... buyer beware, I guess.

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-septemb... is the report.

I lowkey suspect this PRC-based scandal has been underreported because Anthropic went insane with the sidebar UX on this page for some reason; there were many reports on the reports of Houti and Iranian usage, and very few on these sections. Could a week's mass media cycle be this seriously affected by such a stupid thing as a sidebar experiment?? Strange truth, or just fiction?

ummm...I'm a Chinese.(I'm not a English native speaker so my word choice may be strange.) In fact, what you said about PRC gov, sounds like something UFO or something Reptilians. I really don't know WHY do many social media tend to choose topics like this.

Maybe because most people are foolish? Because foolish'es mind is fond of topic that are crazely explosive and magical...?

BUT at the same time, have you experienced the Victorian era? Have you experience the cyberpunk2077? You can come to China. Big companies act without any rules.

Zhipu(GLM) are just common companies like any one another company here.

Here is a CARZYLY NEW WORLD. 99.99% goods are CRAZELY CHEAP while falsely advertising without supervision. 99.99% apps collect users' private info and then sell it. You can easily see it via almost no website even asks if you’re okay with them collecting cookies.

It maybe a common mistake for WestEu/NorthAm people that China is like Soviet or North Korea.

It's diametrically opposite.

At the end of the last century, PRC gov deeply felt that the so-called "fairness" would only lead to "common poverty" and sought change.

So China (now, in this century) was born.

Just like the "famous"(notorious) quote left by a Chinese leader at the end of the last century explaining why restrictions were lifted (you can say this to ANY Chinese, they will definitely think you understand China! Instead of mocking you for reading too many conspiracy theories):

Whether it's a kind cat or an evil cat, as long as it catches a mouse, it's the best cat.

Tangential, mildly amusing thing I noticed while implementing my own harness: GLM and particularly Deepseek are both fond of trying to read dotfiles and anything listed in your .gitignore files. I only noticed it because I have separate read scopes for project files, ignored files, dotfiles and external files, so the latter three always prompt me for approval.

I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for it, which has nothing at all to do with exfiltration of secrets, but it does amuse me when it happens. I imagine the labs have access to lots of secrets that various actors would like to get their hands on...

(shameless plug for my own harness, which is open source and doesn't have a backend to send any data to: https://www.opairdev.org/ )

i use sops

Encrypt: sops encrypt --input-type dotenv --output-type dotenv .env > secrets.enc.env

then rm .env

You can then run your script/dev with: sops exec-env secrets.enc.env 'docker xxxx' (it will ask you for your password, or touch-id to decrypt the secrets)

I like this because this way the .env doesn't sit in the directory at all, and is only passed to your dev environment and stays in it while it's running

Decrypt back to a file (if you ever want that): sops decrypt secrets.enc.env > .env

---

Well ofc, any agent can do docker inspect to get all those env vars, but atleast reading the dotfiles won't do anything

you can also edit the file with: sops --input-type dotenv --output-type dotenv secrets.enc.env

Never use a Harness if it is not opensourced.

DeepSeek Harness is my favorite for coding. Hermes is my favourite for Other things , followed by OpenCode (sucks at managing long running services) .

Others swear by Pi.dev

Z.ai are temporarily offering unlimited usage during off-peak hours with their harness, which is a pretty good deal if your project is public even with this news.

All fun and game until it also silently uploads your other things.

You could always sandbox it or run it in a container

Shouldn't do that, either.

Mind and marketshare are currency in this space. Either these people are honest and deserve your trust and business, or they don't. They've been mischaracterizing the way they've been handling your data. Shut them off accordingly until they make things right.

I mean, it's just basic access control. You don't need to trust every program you run with 100% of all your personal/private information, just confine it to a specific domain accordingly.

I'm fine with certain codebases and configs being shared, but not others, hence the sandbox/container recommendation. I suspect many others are the same way.

Or https://maki.sh :)

looks cool would be nice if its GUI , terminal have limitations .

Crossposting from the other thread...

Tangential, mildly amusing thing I noticed while implementing my own harness: GLM and particularly Deepseek are both fond of trying to read dotfiles and anything listed in your .gitignore files. I only noticed it because I have separate read scopes for project files, ignored files, dotfiles and external files, so the latter three always prompt me for approval.

I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for it, which has nothing at all to do with exfiltration of secrets, but it does amuse me when it happens. I imagine the labs have access to lots of secrets that various actors would like to get their hands on...

(shameless plug for my own harness, which is open source and doesn't have a backend to send any data to: https://www.opairdev.org/ )

I've been using ZCode since it's initial release and can't find any of this in my data. There aren't any logs showing capture or upload, and I don't even have a ~/.zcode/v2/checkpoints/ directory.

So unless they've cleared it all with a recent update then it doesn't seem to affect everyone.

Is it naive to assume that the agent will try and access anything on your disk, either accidentally or maliciously?

Permissions classifiers in auto mode are just models trying to guess if they're doing the right thing.

Claude Code will tell you that it went around a sandbox because the sandbox blocked it. At which point, you ask yourself the point of the sandbox.

At this point does any of us/you really think all those piss-cheap tokens are coming out of thin air? That unlimited token-usage during certain hours was not coming from Chinese side of Himalayan glaciers, was it?

Besides why would you use a closed source harness from a certain place, even if you decide to use the model (if nothing then for the price alone). And, that first remark wasn't just for ZAI but all the providers.

At this point: wrapping the harness around something like sandbox-exec or agent-safehouse is a must. Better still, create a new user account (after so much resistance I am warming up to the idea).

Will ZAI see a blowback after this news? Naah. People will keep using it. Hell, I will keep using it. That's how it is now - post truth and post LLM world.

PS. Anyone singing praise of OpenCode here, it's literally one of the worst harneses, open or not. Just look at their fricking issues - the strategic and rampant placements of "no planned" is mind boggling. And for what? Slightly better than ClaudeCode in token consumption and that too starts getting muddled after a while.

Things like that - and other examples posted here - are why I 'm sticking with OpenCode despite it having some papercuts that annoy me.

The incentives are not there for them to do shady stuff like vacuum your files, inflate your token count just because or many other things.

However, across the entire policy, FAQs, and changelogs, there is not a single mention of silently packaging and uploading entire workspaces and full Git histories.

So this is criminal hacking, right? It will be prosecuted as criminal hacking? Not in civil court, but criminal court. Because if not... then are we totally done pretending, and we're just openly admitting that computer security law only applies to individuals, and corporations are exempt?

[flagged]

z.ai made a statement, screenshotted in this article: https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/roll/2026-09-18/doc-inisfye...

claude translation:

Dear ZCode users,

We take today's community discussion very seriously. We carried out an internal review right away, and we first want to apologize to the affected users. Here is an explanation of what happened:

The issue stems from ZCode's "codebase indexing" feature. This feature is meant to help users generate a repository index locally, which supports session checkpoint restoration (including past versions), rolling back to past versions, and Repo Wiki, among other things.

When the Repo Wiki feature generates Wiki pages, it may trigger an upload of repository data. After the Wiki pages are generated in the cloud, the uploaded data is destroyed immediately and is not stored. Because this feature was enabled by default in its early launch period, some users were affected. We sincerely apologize for this. The issue has now been fixed.

We understand that any data-related issue directly affects users' trust in a product. We will open-source the ZCode codebase in the near future so we can improve the product within a more open ecosystem. We will also invite third-party evaluators to review how the system operates, and we'll keep publishing updates on the review, building your trust with full transparency.

We deeply apologize for the trouble this has caused. As compensation, all ZCode users will receive one extra weekly quota reset, which will be issued today.

Thank you again for your attention and oversight.