After testing Qwen3-Coder-Plus from Alibaba Cloud with Claude Code, I discovered serious issues: poor code comprehension, 2x token billing discrepancies, and incompetent support responses that made this the worst AI coding assistant experience.
I explored Zhipu AI’s GLM-4.5 integration with Claude Code. With 20M free tokens and competitive pricing, it offers a compelling alternative, though with performance comparable to DeepSeek v3.1 despite marketing claims.
After experiencing limitations with Gemini CLI’s reduced free tier and frequent API errors, I discovered how to configure Claude Code with DeepSeek v3.1. This setup provides an excellent AI coding experience at a fraction of the cost, though with some trade-offs in context length.