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Models: I pay Z.ai a lite sub which costs me ~9USD/month and for the last months I've been using `glm-5.3-flash` amost exclusively for my day-to-day. I also make use of free models from OpenRouter for simple CI/CD automated stuff but very little so. When I'm out of sub tokens I fall back to DeepSeek credit. I keep my sub/credit usage public at https://a.l3x.in/usage

Harness: when building/troubleshooting I use https://pi.dev TUI most of the time, the rest of the time is via an issue/PR driven workflow also powered by Pi with this action I built on top of its SDK: https://github.com/shaftoe/awesome-pi-coding-agent/

My general take on AI at https://a.l3x.in/ai

Generally speaking, I think I can hardly be happier than what I am already, the quality of open weight models is incredibly good and the only upgrade I could think of is being able to run one on my workstation one day (I don't even try on my Macbook Air M1), which isn't something crazy to dream about, perhaps in 2/3 years running Deepseek v4 Flash or similar model locally won't require too much of an investment in hardware.

How often on do you hit the limits with the plan? Thx.
It depends very much on the project I'm working on, but recently I almost never run out of tokens before the weekly quota (which seems to be the tightest for me) resets.

I also use some discipline in not letting the context grow too much and usually keep every session very focused, context window fill rarely goes above 10% for me as I prefer to start fresh (perhaps from some markdown artefact saved from a previous session).

If you're used to throw every possible thought to an agent than most probably a light Z.ai subscription is not going to be enough.