CodeGeeX

CodeGeeX is Zhipu's coding assistant, and it has always been the open-weight alternative in a category of closed models: the extension for VS Code, JetBrains and Cloud Studio does completion, explanation and summarisation, costs nothing, and sits on the CodeGeeX4 line — whose CodeGeeX4-ALL-9B model, built on GLM-4-9B, is published for download. The repositories now sit with zai-org, the international brand under which Zhipu ships its GLM models, with code Apache-2.0 and checkpoints under their own weights licence, academic use free and enterprise deployment requiring an agreement. Because the assistant tracks the GLM family instead of evolving its own coding model, its quality ceiling is the family's.

Where it loses: outside the Chinese-language ecosystem CodeGeeX has never matched the agentic workflows, repository-wide context or finish of Cursor, Copilot or Cline, and the extension is a client for a hosted service — you cannot point it at your own inference — so which model you get depends on what the vendor is serving that month. Where it still makes sense is the reason it exists: weights you can inspect, multilingual completion that treats non-English codebases seriously, and a plugin that costs nothing. Read the weights licence before commercial deployment, check which model the extension calls on install day, and if you are outside China measure latency and account requirements first — that is where hosted assistants from this ecosystem usually lose the experience.