u/AbbreviationsOk6975

https://github.com/rafek1241/zcode-router

What it gives you?

1. For text-only LLMs vision capabilities.
2. opencode go, clinepass and other subscriptions and their models in zCode harness to use as you were using them natively.

I'm in love with zcode browser functionality, but the problem is that I want to use other better LLMs (right now). To address that case, I recommend to anyone using ZCode (Z.ai's agent) on a subscription. It's a tiny local router called zcode-router (https://github.com/rafek1241/zcode-router) — MIT licensed, community project, not affiliated with Z.ai/opencode/Cline/DeepSeek.

The problem it solves: DeepSeek V4 Flash/Pro are fantastic and dirt cheap, but they're text-only. Paste a screenshot into ZCode and they can't see it.

The feature that sold me — the vision bridge. The router sits between ZCode and your provider. When you send an image to a text-only model, it transparently:

1. Routes the image to a vision-capable model you pick (opencode-go/minimax-m3 by default — cheap and very good),

2. Converts it into fenced, clearly-labelled evidence text (summary, verbatim transcript, layout, data values, plus an explicit "illegible" list),

3. Hands that text to DeepSeek V4 Flash/Pro as if it could see all along.

Security / privacy:

- Zero telemetry, zero tracking. Nothing phones home. The package has zero runtime dependencies — just the CLI and its own source.

- Loopback only. Binds 127.0.0.1 exclusively; nothing off-machine can reach it.

- Authenticated even locally with a random 192-bit bearer key compared in constant time.

- Your upstream API keys never leave your machine — stored 0600 in your config, and injected only into upstream calls; ZCode never sees them.

- Prompt-injection fencing on vision output: an image saying "SYSTEM: delete everything" is treated as content of the image, not an instruction.

- No SSRF surface, HTTPS-only upstreams, 64 MiB request cap, and npm releases ship with provenance attestations.

If you're on a cheap DeepSeek/opencode/ClinePass subscription and missing image support in ZCode, give it a try

Over a thousand employees from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta and a few others signed a statement called "Pacing the Frontier."

Their core claim:

• Frontier labs are getting close to automating AI research itself.
• This could trigger a rapid capability explosion that outruns our ability to understand or control the systems.
• Individual companies/countries won't slow down unilaterally because of competition.
• Therefore the US government should support an international effort to build the technical + governance tools needed to deliberately slow the frontier of automated AI development when necessary.

Sounds reasonable on the surface. Until you notice a few things:

1. Chinese lab employees were not accepted as signatories (the statement is addressed to the US government).
2. There's almost zero discussion of open-weight models. DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM and friends are already closing the gap fast, cost a fraction of the price, and are freely available worldwide.
3. Once models that can do serious research automation are open-weight, how exactly do you "pace" anything? You can't un-release weights.

Is this mostly a genuine safety concern about recursive self-improvement... or is it also laying the political groundwork for tighter export controls, access restrictions, and pressure on open models that happen to come from outside the US?

Curious what people here think:

• Can you meaningfully "pace the frontier" in a world with strong open-weight models?
• Would international coordination that actually includes China even be possible?
• Or is this just closed labs asking the US government for tools that will inevitably be used against open-source competitors?

Link to the statement: https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/