Trae: An AI-powered IDE by ByteDance
427 comments
·January 23, 2025softirq
_Algernon_
It doesn't though. You can still code the old fashioned way, and you are even likely to become a better programmer for it.
Personally, I tried copilot when I got it for free as a student and it didnt make a difference. The reason I know is that I was coding on two devices, one which had copilot installed the other didnt, and I didnt care enough to install it on the latter through an entire semester.
Its just slightly better autocomplete, by a questionable standard of "better".
redviperpt
I agree with your overall point, but Cursor's autocomplete is significantly betters than copilots.
mostlysimilar
Then don't use autocomplete.
dartos
Don’t worry.
There’s literally nothing an llm can write or tell you that you can’t write yourself or find in a manual somewhere.
TeMPOraL
> There’s literally nothing an llm can write or tell you that you can’t write yourself or find in a manual somewhere.
That's like saying, there's literally nothing a service business can do for you that you can't do yourself. It's only true in a theoretical sense, if neither time nor resources are a constraint.
In such hypothetical universe, you don't need a dentist - you only need to spend 5+ years in medical school + whatever extra it takes to become proficient with tools dentists use + whatever money it takes to buy that equipment. You also don't need accountants, lawyers, hairdressers, or construction companies. You can always learn this stuff and do it yourself better!
Truth is, time and attention is finite. Meanwhile, SOTA LLMs are cheap as dirt, they can do pretty much anything that involves text, and do it at the level of a mediocre specialist - i.e. they're literally better than you at anything except the few things you happen to be experienced in. Not perfect, by no means error-free - just better than you. I feel this still hasn't sunk in for most people.
dartos
> That's like saying, there's literally nothing a service business can do for you that you can't do yourself.
No, it’s not. You’re making my statement abstract for the sake of arguing.
I’m not a cook, doctor, or a lawyer. I can’t prepare meals for a party of more than 2.
I can’t perform surgery.
I can’t effectively defend myself in a court of law.
I (and I assume OP) have programming expertise.
I can write exactly all code an llm could write.
For simple scripts, demos and other easily Googleable tasks, LLMs will be faster, but it’s nothing out of reach for me.
These tools won’t force you to pay a subscription to code. You don’t need them if you already have experience.
renewedrebecca
No. Just what, two years ago, no one was really using LLMs to do this sort of thing? Why do we suddenly have to use these tools now?
If your job is to write software, then you're the accountant or lawyer or doctor. Otherwise, what do we even bring to the table?
tarkonaut
> they're literally better than you at anything except the few things you happen to be experienced in
Like speaking english and coding?
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ryang2718
Although, tbf, some libraries are documented better than others.
Also, local llms with an agentic tool can be a lot of fun to quickly prototype things. Quality can be hit or miss.
Hopefully the work trickles down to local models long-term.
guappa
And you think an llm can generate code to use an undocumented library? :D
wrsh07
You can run it all locally: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vscode
wilg
This is a free tool (though I wouldn't use it since its from Bytedance). Also you could have an AI powered IDE locally without a subscription.
d1sxeyes
For now. It’s not clear what the monetisation strategy is, but probably it will be paid in future (alongside whatever other strategies they may have, like selling data, etc)
sdesol
> world where coding costs a subscription
I think you are approaching this with the wrong mindset. I see it as I'm paying somebody to type and document for me. If you treat LLMs like a power tool, it is very easy to do a cost benefit analysis.
pjmlp
That is what happens when developers want to be paid for their work, but refuse to pay for the tools they use, regardless of little they may cost.
So we're going back to the last century, but given we are in a different computing context, only the stuff that can be gated via digital stores, or Web Services, gets to have a way to force people to pay.
eikenberry
You are not alone. The only future for these sorts of AI coding helpers is for them to use 100% free software AIs. On the bright side good progress is being made in that area and the main sticking point seems to be the expensive hardware to run them on (and integration). Costs on that hardware will hopefully drop over time so they won't still be mostly limited to 1st world (like the subscriptions).
codr7
It will fail epically as always with these morons, let's hope some of us still feel like helping out once the coin drops.
ltadeut
That's not going away at all though.
But I am glad we now have more paid options available. Tooling is important and people that do good work should be able to charge for high quality tools.
I would be much happier in a world full of tools licensed like Sublime Text, where I can purchase a license and just run it without the need to constantly phone home though.
verdverm
Trae and Cursor have both certainly embraced the Kelsey Hightower take on "no code" platforms
https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode
timdorr
Even better is nothing at all: https://github.com/timdorr/-
Not even a commit: https://github.com/timdorr/-/commit/9e5a571abd3fc4f8714e8c40...
verdverm
Is that not a commit hash in the link?
This is what a commit-less repo looks like on GH: https://github.com/verdverm/_
Unfortunately they don't show the description "starting repository for any language and project" (a play on the _ (any) token in CUE)
doix
I see many comments about not using this because China/ByteDance stealing data, etc. I get it for for enterprise, you don't want your code leaking to the outside world, even if in my experience, the code is mostly garbage and not worth that much.
But if it's for some personal project that you're putting on Github, does it matter? If my code is going on Github anyway, it's going to get slurped up regardless. I don't particularly care if it gets processed by Cursor or ByteDance before it gets scraped.
diggan
> But if it's for some personal project that you're putting on Github, does it matter?
I don't think the fear is that they'll steal code you'll end putting publicly on GitHub, but everything else. I guess there is some fear that it won't just analyze and process what you currently have open, but might scrape your computer for more data and so on.
I personally don't believe ByteDance would be stupid enough to even attempt exfiltrating files from developers machines, which typically are better protected than the average user computer, just trying to see the perspective of others with a more charitable reading :)
throwaind29k
You don't trust the OS do that kind of safeguarding?
ryandrake
Desktop OS's typically don't protect one application's data from another, or the system's data from an application. At least not out of the box without configuring some kind of sandboxing solution.
The user-based permissions model is an outdated dinosaur from a time when we could trust the applications we run on our systems to act on our behalf. Applications now act on the developer's behalf, often against the user. An application "running as me" should not have access to every resource (file or peripheral) on the device that I have access to. That's a huge blast radius.
Operating Systems really need to start treating developers as adversarial from a security/permissions point of view.
Coryodaniel
Trust em or not … had that happen to someone else using Cursor a few weeks back. I ran a prompt for refactoring a function and all of a sudden it started dumping someone else’s directory structure and file contents into my text file. Like hundreds of files. Not exactly sure what happened but I immediately uninstalled Cursor.
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littlestymaar
I'm glad people care about their personal data, I just wished they cared as much when talking about ChatGPT, because in reality if you're not a Chinese dissident living abroad, then OpenAI is much more dangerous to you than the CCP.
knowitnone
OpenAI does not have a history of disappearing people and when they return, their attitude has completely changed (see Jack Ma). OpenAI does not have a history of aggression against other nations shipping vessels. OpenAI does not have a history of corporate espionage and IP theft. OpenAI does not have a history of setting up police stations in other nations. OpenAI does not have a history of operating an illegal bio-lab in foreign nations. That's pretty defamatory to compare OpenAI to the CCP. OpenAI does not have a history of spreading a virus that killed millions and pointing fingers at other nations.
d0mine
If we are talking countries here, then all that you've mentioned is done by both sides. If we are talking companies then as far as I know only one of them is developing killer robots (guess which one).
nuancebydefault
About the virus: you really need to be less in the company of people thinking up conspiracy theories. Remember that a pandemic has always been predicted in a 'not if but when' sense.
For the rest of the provided history feats, I can't really tell but most of it appeared indeed in established newschannels.
mig1
Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Sponsoring a genocide… the moral differences between the US and the CCP are imaginary.
jay-barronville
> […] in reality if you're not a Chinese dissident living abroad, then OpenAI is much more dangerous to you than the CCP.
Correct.
I laugh a little every time I hear some folks immediately push the “Big Bad China is just trying to steal our data” narrative. My immediate reaction is, “Grab some tea and let’s sit down real quick, so I can tell you what some of our companies right here in America and our government do with our data.”
kstrauser
It’s legal to be opposed to both, you know. At least OpenAI is in my legal jurisdiction.
knowitnone
so all your code goes on Github because mine certainly does not
jofzar
Who would ever allow this in their organisation after the tiktok shutdown, just go for one of the other 17 ai IDE forks
diggan
Who cares what political stunts the US is currently going through? Except for the ~4% of the world who happens to live there, the rest of us tend to choose tools based on either what others around us use, or what we've found to work best for us.
If that happens to be an editor from China instead of US, I don't know what difference that would make? Both governments in those countries are crazy about spying on both their own citizens and everyone else, and have their corporations under surveillance.
As long as the editor doesn't send opened files/files from my drive to some remote backend, I couldn't care less about the nationality of the developers.
netdevphoenix
> As long as the editor doesn't send opened files/files from my drive to some remote backend
I see your point but in this particular case, I think it needs to send the opened files to a backend for processing
echoangle
> As long as the editor doesn't send opened files/files from my drive to some remote backend, I couldn't care less about the nationality of the developers.
Is this sarcasm? Isn’t that exactly what the editor has to do to do its job? How else would the AI stuff work? It’s not running on-device, right?
knowitnone
then you should install everything that comes out of China, Russia, North Korea, Iran
diggan
I mean, I have some stuff from China, some of the stuff from there is cheap and high quality, so why wouldn't I? I don't know of many consumer products from Russia, North Korea or Iran. I'm sure if there was something from those countries that I really wanted, I'd buy it.
Edit: Actually I do have a product that is kind of Russian, Flipper Zero. I'm don't remember if I bought it before they moved the company to the US though, or while it was based in Russia.
stiltzkin
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nurumaik
China itself? Russia that has been blocked from all western services? Any non-US/western company?
wood_spirit
This is being talked about in real life as we post on HN: the new administration has a different opinion on this https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cn0y51z7wedt
(I am guessing that there will be a deal floated for Elon to buy TikTok in a few weeks)
ioulaum
It's doubtful if he can pony up another $50 billion.
Although, if TikTok's earnings can cover the payments on the loan, it could be possible.
herbst
Its not shut down, your president made it available again without a single change. And it was only a geoblock to begin with. By that logic it can't be that bad?
netdevphoenix
Not quite. At least in iOs, you can't redownload it, so if you uninstall it or change phones, no more TikTok. Also, Apple will be blocking any updates to the app for US folk.
Apparently, the executive order was illegal
smrtinsert
This is the real issue.
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cedws
TikTok was shut down because of clueless bureaucrats and political games, not because of any specific threat. If there was a real risk posed by China why are they idly allowing millions of people to migrate to Xiaohongshu, which is even more strongly controlled by China?
Aloisius
What bureaucrats?
It was banned because of a law passed by Congress. Representatives aren't bureaucrats.
ioulaum
It was always BS though. AOC did an interview where she explains (what should be obvious to anyone), that US Gov had no proof whatsoever beyond trying to point at that Chinese law (much like Section 702 in the US), that makes TikTok seem risky.
Except that TikTok isn't legally a Chinese company, and isn't really under their jurisdiction.
Chinese companies like to be under the control of the Chinese government no more than big American companies like to be overly exposed to the US... Thus Apple being based in Ireland and keeping most of their profit outside of the US.
Prbeek
[flagged]
karunamurti
TikTok ban plan may actually snowball, because now China thinking about their soft power and opening their internet to the world. The 16th Shanghai Municipal People's Congress actually talked about this.
They have a lot of companies with very large consumer, and their market is saturated already. Time to expand to the rest of the world.
meowface
They'll probably (justifiably) try to ban Xiaohongshu, too, if it gets anywhere near TikTok's reach in the US market.
thekevan
There's no way I am using a Chinese IDE with VSCode (w/ Coppilot) and Cursor existing after reading the privacy issues in the court documents with TikTok. Bytedance had some extremely overreaching expectations of data it wanted.
That being said, I am using (Chinese) Deepseek r1 because there isn't currently a free LLM on par with it. I am careful with what I share though, a little more so than with any others that are not locally fun.
guappa
To me USA and China are both foreign nations, and USA is the one who is far more aggressive in terms of army and spies.
So as a non USA citizen, I'm way more afraid of USA than I am of China.
animuchan
I'm thinking about this the same way, if a bit more selfishly: as a non-US citizen, I might want to move to the US in the future.
Which is why I would like the US govt to have as little data as possible about me (who knows what the mainstream politics will look like, things that are very innocent today might be punishable by death in 10 years).
Chinese govt, on the other hand, can have my data freely, since I don't think I'll ever move to the Mainland China.
latexr
> I might want to move to the US in the future.
> (…) (who knows what the mainstream politics will look like, things that are very innocent today might be punishable by death in 10 years).
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think I’d ever consider moving to a country where I believed politics to be so unstable that an action could go from “very innocent” to “punishable by death” in the span of a decade.
yard2010
In 1-2 decades Mainland China will move to you ;)
redcobra762
Then you know nothing of how China operates its military or its intelligence gathering apparatus. Ask any of the parts of the world that disagree with China about their sovereignty…
guappa
I don't see tanks in taiwan…
What I see is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_oversea...
As I've already said, I never claimed china are the good guys. Just that they aren't the worse guys.
computerthings
That something else is even more toxic doesn't make poison not poison. It's not a choice between what poison you pick, but between accepting or rejecting poison.
TeMPOraL
A poison is not going to harm you unless it makes no contact with your body; what GP is saying is, regardless of which one is more potent, it's safer to pick the one you're least likely to ever find yourself near.
roenxi
And, logically - if we're worried about spying - it actually makes the most sense for average Chinese people to use US software and vice versa. The biggest threat to a person is always the police & military of their own country.
For example, China killed a lot of people. They were all Chinese.
miningape
I think you're unaware of just how aggressive China is. Look at their neighbours and their policies - they don't have a single friend because everyone is afraid of their bullying behaviour backed up by their military.
Look at conquered regions like Tibet and Xinjiang.
Look at how they set up police forces in foreign countries to keep an eye on Chinese citizens living abroad. Even having kidnapped and illegally held Chinese citizens in England because they posted anti-CCP messages on WeChat.
Look at countries like the Phillipines (not even a direct neighbour) who are trying to hold on to small fishing islands just off their coast because the CCP claimed those islands in the 1970s.
Remember a few years ago when they ran a week long military exercise around Taiwan... because a US representative spoke to the Taiwanese president. Sure I agree with you that the US also overstepped a line here, but for your response to be shelling the waters around the island is excessive to say the least.
Look at the aggressive nationalist and imperialist news they feed their own population, and the propaganda spread to make the Japanese seem like demons. Did you know there are several theme parks in China where children are encouraged to Bayonette a mannequin of Japanese Imperialist soldiers?
Call the US as bad as you like, but I've never seen a theme park where children are actively taught how to kill and demonise the Taliban or Nazis.
spencerflem
You could say all of that about the American empire.
We renamed it to the Gulf of America, talk about annexing Canada, own Hawaii, fund the colony of Israel, invented Manifest Destony, destabilize democracy via the CIA, firebombed Vietnam, etc etc etc
And don't talk to me abt Chinese spying when the NSA and Five Eyes hoovers up and processes the entire internet.
Re: propaganda, read your own comment. The American propaganda machine got you to demonize China pretty well
And to top it all off, despite having a much smaller population AMERICA HAS MORE PRISONERS THAN CHINA. Its insane!
yard2010
Why don't you ask the kids at Tiananmen Square? / Was fashion the reason why they were there?
animuchan
Taliban is a terrorist group, painting them in a bad light is factual.
Nazis, also factual.
So I don't think I fully understand the last sentence. Do you mean it's not appropriate for specifically _minors_ to have a theme park about how Nazis are bad guys? Because there's a lot of western content to this effect, including movies and video games, which are also accessible to children.
If anything, Chinese content guidelines usually prohibit graphical display of violence, so it's much more of a milquetoast thing than e.g. South Park.
lbrito
The cognitive dissonance here is beyond words.
Iny0ka
Fact check: China has strong ties with Central Asian states, Russia, NK, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Pakistan. Regional tensions mainly involve US-allied nations.
guappa
Can you compare the military spending of one vs the other and report back please?
I never said china has never done anything bad. There is no such country on the planet.
China doing bad stuff doesn't make the bad stuff the other countries do disappear, and my point remains valid on which one is more of a threat to nationals of other countries.
sausagefeet
If you woke up tomorrow in either USA or China, which would you prefer to wake up in and why?
bromuro
Living in these countries sounds to me like a nightmare (and I am from a 3rd world country). I’d prefer China because the ancient culture, history and thriving economy.
guappa
If you want to pay me a trip, I'd gladly go to both, and leave my regular electronic devices at home while crossing both borders :D
grardb
I feel the need to point out that while many people might understand the point you're trying to make, the way this question is phrased doesn't do the best job of conveying it.
If I was presented with two options: waking up tomorrow as the child of a poor farmer in a third-world country, or waking up as one of Donald Trump's children, I would definitely choose the latter. However, that doesn't mean that I trust Trump more than I would trust the farmer. In other words, quality of life (or a preferred way of living) are not inherently tied to trust, morality, or anything like that.
gaoryrt
Classic false dilemma[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
roca
That makes you an outlier. Despite everything, millions of people are still desperate to get into the USA. China, not so much.
guappa
They wouldn't be desperate to get into USA if you stopped messing up their countries.
knowitnone
good for you. don't ever visit the US because they are watching you closely
riskyingo
I would rather let Chinese companies take my data than US/EU ones where I have bank accounts. Unless you are a super important, influential person, you shouldn't worry about China.
littlestymaar
You forgot people of Chinese origin which the CCP monitors even abroad (scary stuff really) but yes.
ryang2718
How have you found R1? I've been meaning to try it with Aider's Architect mode.
Have you tried the 7b?
chvid
As far as I can tell this is operated out of Singapore, which is not some communist backwater, according to the law there and on top of US big tech infrastructure. The models this editor work with are by Anthropic and OpenAI both US companies.
truekonrads
Singapore or not, these TOS grant you nada in terms of privacy. You'd be a fool to use this: We may use Your Content to provide the Services to you and to other users, including without limitation troubleshooting, diagnostics, security and safety reviews, and customer support requests. You hereby grant to us, our affiliates and our third party partners (“SPRING Parties”) an unconditional, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable, perpetual and worldwide license, to reproduce, use, and modify Your Content in connection with the provision and improvement of the Services and its underlying technologies, as well as for the SPRING Parties' respective business operations, in each case, to the extent permitted by applicable laws.
blackeyeblitzar
One nuance to consider regarding Bytedance: TikTok’s CEO is also based in Singapore, but is a former Xiaomi executive who worked in Beijing for years. The firm’s employees in places like Singapore could be coerced by the government of China because of their friends, family, assets there.
Employees of Bytedance (and other Chinese companies) have to deal with draconian employee rules and agreements that tie them back to the rules of their Chinese mainland parent corporation and the Chinese government itself. For example look at the details that came out in this lawsuit against TikTok, where employees have to agree to uphold Chinese national interests, uphold socialism, etc.
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
stiltzkin
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samy_aik
I think you are contradicting yourself! Also, why add "China" to a product when you don't attach "America" to the other. If you are thinking politics, fine, else we are in for tech advancement!
ioulaum
I doubt that this sends back tons of data.
Early TikTok was basically a standard Chinese startup in terms of how they collected data to optimize the app... It's not because they cared about what "you" are doing.
The Chinese tech ecosystem is just more competitive than the US one.
Most social media companies have been careless with data until they got public backlash though... TikTok's systems are probably more secure today than anyone else's... Because of the backlash.
nikkwong
Absolutely and verifiably false. WeChat became so important to the CCPs surveillance interests that it was essentially nationalized; and other apps that grow to its scale basically suffer the same fate. The only reason that hasn’t happened overtly to TikTok is because it’s an international product, so instead the nationalization happens discretely.
gunian
You don't hear about the other side because people like me usually get murdered in cold blood there is no difference but for you to believe that is a singularity like me being treated like a human :)
ioulaum
It is verifiably not controlled by the CCP... Refer Project Texas... And all US data already being on Oracle's cloud so that all access can be monitored (same for auditing of all their algorithms for any kind of programmed bias).
WeChat is an app that works inside China, so obviously it's subject to Chinese laws.
All countries have some restrictions on what is and is not okay to have on online platforms. China just adds in "social disruption" alongside content that could promote violence (which would be blocked on Facebook, etc. also)
You need to not just drink in propaganda... When something just "can't be done" (because it is being monitored), then it just doesn't matter even if you have ill intent.
aredox
ByteDance is ready to close TikTok rather than divest and earn billions of dollars.
Does that sound like a business or an intelligence front?
ioulaum
No one with even a pretension to dignity would just cave in the face of force.
Although, they do seem willing to sell potentially.
China restricted them from selling their recommendation algorithm, and it's hard to sell TikTok without.
But, TikTok did immediately start work on an independent algorithm that has no ties to China, so that they can sell it if it really comes down to it.
echelon
China is taking every venture-funded AI startup and shitting on them. Almost all of them.
Tencent's Hunyuan 3D - Tripo, etc.
Tencent's Hunyuan Video - Sora, Runway, Pika, etc.
ByteDance's Trae - Cursor, etc.
DeepSeek R1 - GPT, etc.
Unitree - Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, etc.
And a ton of this stuff is completely open source. All of the Tencent stuff is. This destroys the moat of so many companies that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars training and building their tech. It's just out there for free for anyone to build with.
And has anyone been checking the volume of Chinese AI research papers? Almost every impactful paper I've read in the last month has mostly Chinese names. And a lot of those papers come with code. Usually permissively licensed.
China is absolutely killing at the AI game. They've fast followed (or in many cases led) into a position of strength.
I wouldn't want to be RunwayML, Pika, Luma, or Tripo right now. Any "foundation model" company with a single use case is getting cloned and commoditized.
edit: Please don't downvote me because you don't like the message. I'm actually fine with you shooting the messenger, but this is absolutely worth talking about. It's pretty surreal to watch this all start to unfold over the last quarter or so. I want to read what others think about it.
whatever1
Slightly relevant but they are also in the game of commercial mathematical optimization solvers and this year they reached parity with the sota American ones (ibm cplex, gurobi, Fico Xpress).
It is that bad that all the American companies withrew from the public benchmark library. You can only see there Chinese commercial solvers and open source ones.
coliveira
Yes, I checked the recent solvers in the MIP space and it seems they're blowing out the existing American solvers. Huawei has invested a lot of money in this area.
But in my opinion this was completely expected, most research in this area is now done in China, American universities have in comparison stopped in time.
coalteddy
Any blogs or other writing about this topic you can recommend? I worked with gurobi in the past but haven't been keeping up with the trends and performance gains.
Love this field of CS!
dr_kiszonka
If these AI efforts are funded by the Chinese government, it makes perfect sense as a strategy. The more successful they are, the more risky it becomes to invest in US AI companies, leading to fewer investments (and less know-how in the long term), and China getting even more ahead.
(I am not in AI, so please correct me if this is inaccurate.)
whoevercares
Good news is the system in China frequently get in the way - people with connections wins the government or state owned businesses contract, making it tougher for many innovators to strive with a shrinking private-owned/consumer-demand environment
(Source: frustrated friends who lose the government contract to someone with inferior technology)
segmondy
Trae doesn't look opensource, from their site looks like you download the binary (osx only for now) and install it. You can't configure it to use your own AI or another provider. You need to use their own API, all your prompts and code are go to bytedance.
whoevercares
Computer vision and deep learning conferences have been overwhelmed with Chinese authors since many years ago. No surprises. However the quality of the work skyrocketed recently
lsllc
Interesting theory -- maybe trying to diluting/confusing the technology market with alternatives that phone home [to the LLM] with your content.
I just had to talk someone I know out of using RedNote as the TikTok shutdown loomed last week -- they had ZERO IDEA about its provenance. Unless you're paying attention, it's actually not clear what's what.
Yeri
While I definitely wouldn't trust this tech, we've also normalised phoning home with all western tech.
How many products keep sending all kind of unknown telemetry, have a ton of trackers, etc?
Can't really blame them doing the same.
wruza
Maybe they just be them, being a second economy and a 4x bigger population that is a few iq points smarter on average.
fspeech
How could more competition be bad? Sure some startups' business plans no longer work and have to pivot but many more startups now have access to better products at lower cost.
pzo
Yeah I have similar feeling:
1) They try similar like Zuck with LLama make sure GPT or Claude or Gemini is not the real winner in the West world like Android/iOS was for smartphone, Facebook/Whatsapp for social media/IM, Google Search for search, Windows for desktop OS. Majority people get used to to single product and they don't switch often.
2) Trying to kickstart community similar like LLama kickstarted big community around it that helped with tooling, testing, etc.
3) Slowing down development of ai companies in the west - giving them less data for training (after all midjourney, elevenlabs, llama kickstarted training on copyrighted content, it's pretty sure they using user data at least from e.g. free version of GPTo-mini) and bleeding their budget kind of war of attrition.
4) Familiarise the west audience with their ai models - after all still not many people using models like DeepkSeek since not many providers host them and majority of people don't have fast enough computer to run full models fast enough - Trae helps with that
suraci
They did what they did because everything they want to buy is banned or is to be banned by your government.
Or are you being sarcastic? You must be being sarcastic.
pzo
I'm not being sarcastic. If that would be the only reason you said then they wouldn't open source it or didn't market for english speaking audience.
xnx
ByteDance's UI-TARS - Skyvern, ec.
DoctorOW
I feel like this would've been better as a VSCode extension. Copilot, Q, Gemini, all were able to take this approach. Also, VSCode isn't considered a full IDE and adding some AI features isn't enough to change that. It seems like they forked VS Code just for the ability to say they "created an IDE" in the same way other projects fork Chromium to "build a browser".
ed
Nah the extension API is pretty limited. Copilot uses proprietary API’s not available to extensions.
If you really want an integrated experience, and not just a sidebar UI, you need to go the same route as Cursor and fork Code-OSS (the MIT-licensed part of VS Code, analogous to Chromium for Chrome)
ThePyCoder
What about Continue? It's an open source, bring your own api AI integration for vscode. It does everything that copilot does, including the editing-your-code-in-front-of-you diff style editor.
I don't think it has any special api access?
tushgaurav
No, I don't think that's possible, VSCode's extension API is pretty limited. This is the reason that we have cursor as a separate application.
antoniuschan99
Bytedance is signalling it wants to compete against vscode for ide marketshare.
Wondering if it is a fork of vscode though because right now it will be competing against cursor.
verdverm
It looks to be a fork, as other comments and the license list seem to indicate
giancarlostoro
Reminds me of JetBrains AI, I think I'll stick to JetBrains solution for the time being. I'm not super crazy on AI coding solutions, but the JetBrains flavor hits a sweet spot for me, built-in and does what I usually need it to do.
krashidov
Has it gotten better? I tried it out early and it was unusable
giancarlostoro
It is definitely quirky, but I am able to use it mainly to scaffold things, and to ask it to refactor things. I only use it for personal projects so far where its no biggie if it doesn't work out, or to ask it about stack traces.
I've also blankly asked it if there's any issues with the current code, and found errors before I try to build / run a project.
joshstrange
Same here, I need to try it again but Copilot+Aider cover my needs right now. I would like LLM completion in my commit messages which Copilot doesn't have but JetBrains AI does IIRC. I really want JetBrains AI to get better, I think they are supposed to be adding Claude support this month? Or already did?
surfingdino
Still unusable. I had to disable it.
entropyneur
It's hard enough to avoid Chinese electronics, I'm not about to start using Chinese software.
jbverschoor
You should be running any dev stuff in a VM / Container anyway because of all the supply chain attacks / typo malware
halamadrid
My personal experience has been that very basic stuff like converting an object to another shape or creating a simple validation function or things like that has been super effective with AI. I've gotten so lazy that I try and prompt it to exactly what I want instead of even editing a bit.
But the moment it gets a little less basic, its a different story. I absolutely hate the experience. So I love it and I hate it at the same time. Is it going to replace me? I don't feel like its there yet. And this has been the case for a while now.
There is just too much money and people invested in this that its hard to say anything negative about it. Nearly every VC has rebranded their websites around an AI-driven future. And, to be fair, it’s not a fad—it genuinely works well for many things. But for now, I’m still skeptical about how far it can really go.
orange_puff
I am enjoying Trae so far, but was wondering if it is possible to point it at a local model. https://docs.trae.ai/docs/open-source-software-notice?_lang=... I am not seeing any mention of this in the docs
RamblingCTO
I've been toying with roo-code (cline fork) and it's fun. Before you give out your data to china maybe consider that or continue.
Side note, but I hate that we're moving to a world where coding costs a subscription. I fell in love with coding because I could take my dad's old Thinkpad, install Linux for free - fire up Emacs and start hacking without an internet connection.
We're truly building walls everywhere.