Yan Yi

TIL: Claude Code with Chinese LLMs

· Yan Yi Goh· 2 min read

I was playing around with Chinese Large Language Models (LLMs). Both Kimi K2 and GLM-4.5 feel a bit slower than Claude Sonnet 4 when I’m using Claude Code, though GLM-4.5 definitely feels more responsive than Kimi K2. I haven’t done enough programming with them yet to really compare how they perform, but I can tell GLM-4.5 is way snappier ⚡.

What’s interesting is the pricing - they’re both way more affordable than Claude. GLM-4.5 is $3/month (first month), $6/month thereafter compared to Claude Pro’s $20/month. Kimi K2 uses API-based pricing though, so that could add up depending on how much I use it.

Here’s an example of the cost output from using Kimi K2:

> /cost
  ⎿  Total cost:            $9.22 (costs may be inaccurate due to usage of unknown models)
     Total duration (API):  14m 6.5s
     Total duration (wall): 30m 52.5s
     Total code changes:    269 lines added, 43 lines removed
     Usage by model:
         claude-3-5-haiku:  21.9k input, 567 output, 0 cache read, 0 cache write
     kimi-k2-0905-preview:  3.0m input, 8.6k output, 0 cache read, 0 cache write

Here’s what I have inside my ~/.config/fish/functions/ directory:

# kimi.fish
function kimi
    if test -z "$MOONSHOT_API_KEY"  # $ZAI_API_KEY
        echo "Error: MOONSHOT_API_KEY environment variable is not set"
        return 1
    end
    set -gx ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL https://api.moonshot.ai/anthropic  # https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic
    set -gx ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN $MOONSHOT_API_KEY  # $ZAI_API_KEY
    claude --model kimi-k2-0905-preview $argv  # glm-4.5 for GLM-4.5
end

# zai.fish would be identical except for the commented differences above

Since I’m still new to the Fish shell, I also learned today that I can set the $MOONSHOT_API_KEY and $ZAI_API_KEY variables without exposing them in env.

I have a secrets.fish file recommended by Claude Sonnet 4 inside ~/.config/fish/conf.d:

# Secret API keys - universal but not exported (won't show in `env`)
set -U MOONSHOT_API_KEY value
set -U ZAI_API_KEY value