zai-cli

zai-cli is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from numman-ali/n-skills. It costs 111 tokens per session (555 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A command-line interface for Z.AI services, including image and video analysis, OCR, web search, web-page reading, GitHub repository search, MCP tool discovery, and TypeScript tool chaining. A CLI is a program you operate from a terminal.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect screenshots or videos, extract text, search and read web pages, find and read GitHub code, discover or call MCP tools, chain calls with TypeScript, and diagnose configuration.
Why use it?
It brings several research, vision, repository, and tool-calling tasks into scripts or terminal workflows. It also provides commands for checking setup and connectivity.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the zai-cli plugin — 1 skill shipped together

About the project

n-skills is a curated marketplace for reusable instructions and skills that extend AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other agents that read AGENTS.md. Users install these workflow, tool, and orchestration packages through native installers or the universal OpenSkills installer. The catalogue plugins and skills are examples of the packages it distributes.

numman-ali/n-skills · 1,040 stars · on GitHub

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/numman-ali/n-skills/zai-cli
Any agent
npx skills add numman-ali/n-skills --skill zai-cli
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/numman-ali/n-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install zai-cli, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for zai-cli

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/numman-ali/n-skills/zai-cli.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/numman-ali/n-skills/zai-cli)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/numman-ali/n-skills/zai-cli"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/numman-ali/n-skills/zai-cli.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 111 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 555 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00111 $0.00555
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.00278
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00111
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00056

Measured 4d ago against content hash 089a052b6771, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

zai-cli scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

  • zai-cli — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
skills/tools/zai-cli/skills/zai-cli/SKILL.md · 71 lines

What it actually says

ZAI CLI

Access Z.AI capabilities via npx zai-cli. The CLI is self-documenting - use --help at any level.

Setup

export Z_AI_API_KEY="your-api-key"

Get a key at: https://z.ai/manage-apikey/apikey-list

Commands

Command Purpose Help
vision Analyze images, screenshots, videos --help for 8 subcommands
search Real-time web search --help for filtering options
read Fetch web pages as markdown --help for format options
repo GitHub code search and reading --help for tree/search/read
tools List available MCP tools
tool Show tool schema
call Raw MCP tool invocation
code TypeScript tool chaining
doctor Check setup and connectivity

Quick Start

# Analyze an image
npx zai-cli vision analyze ./screenshot.png "What errors do you see?"

# Search the web
npx zai-cli search "React 19 new features" --count 5

# Read a web page
npx zai-cli read https://docs.example.com/api
npx zai-cli read https://docs.example.com/api --with-images-summary --no-gfm

# Explore a GitHub repo
npx zai-cli repo search facebook/react "server components"
npx zai-cli repo search openai/codex "config" --language en
npx zai-cli repo tree openai/codex --path codex-rs --depth 2

# Check setup
npx zai-cli doctor

Output

Default: data-only (raw output for token efficiency). Use --output-format json for { success, data, timestamp } wrapping.

Advanced

For raw MCP tool calls (tools, tool, call), Code Mode, and performance tuning (cache/retries), see references/advanced.md.

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 4d ago First seen · 71 lines · 111 tokens per session scan A 089a052b6771

Subscribe to this mod's changes

zai-cli is a skill published in the GitHub repository numman-ali/n-skills (1,040 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 111 tokens to every session and 555 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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