Trae: An AI Powered IDE by ByteDance
26 comments
·January 23, 2025DoctorOW
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".
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...
thomasfromcdnjs
Awesome work.
Sidenote: That marketing video was nauseating, it was moving too fast and didn't show any features for long enough or for enough steps.
jofzar
Who would ever allow this in their organisation after the tiktok shutdown, just go for one of the other 17 ai IDE forks
nextworddev
Clearly leaking dance videos to China is more dangerous than leaking your codebase and credentials /s
Jokes aside hope Cursor etc has secured their s3 buckets correctly
mring33621
What LLM provider(s) is it talking to?
noloblo
Is it electron or rust?
rumblefrog
It appears to be a VSCode fork, and supports VSC marketplace extensions, so I would guess Electron
noloblo
Hard to look at slower editors after sublime speed and hyper speed from zed rust
jmccarthy
0:01.39 /Applications/Trae.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron
swozey
I can't imagine getting an engineering job at an engineering company and asking them if I'd be allowed to create an opensource IDE that would never be a sold product. I can barely even get allowed time to write SRE tooling to improve our own engineers lives.
Some C-levels newphew into computers and need a school project or something?
markus_zhang
Bytedance created all internal tools by themselves. Personally I'd definitely love to join such a company if I'm in that tooling team. Whether they are being used by outsiders is irrelevant because I already bagged the skills.
swozey
Eh, I make tooling for a living. It sucks to have nobody using your tools even if they were fun to make. You spend months/years putting something out there that you think will really benefit a company/team/foss and it goes nowhere. It's like painting a painting you love and it getting thrown in an attic.
null
ElectroNomad
How is it different from Cursor?
Just another AI wrapper around VS Code smh
atulvi
Another vscode wrapper
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.
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.
xnx
ByteDance's UI-TARS - Skyvern, ec.
add-sub-mul-div
Maybe they think it's in their national interest that a generation of Americans stops practicing their reading skills because of the tl;dr machine and stops building job skills that aren't reliant on the job-doing machine.
DoctorOW
I'm okay with the software being made open to the public. I think ultimately it's good for society as a whole. The US is welcome to do the same (I.E. actually opening OpenAI) but I don't think the drawbacks of AI are mitigated by making it more profitable to the American establishment.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because every time I try to use AI for any of my projects - including the "better" Anthropic and OpenAI models, I get terribly written, buggy code that has nothing to do with the domain or question. Unless I'm feeding it actual softball, single function questions it adds almost no value to my dev cycle. Mind you, all of this terrible code also costs a ton in tokens.
It's sad because I have seen some truly remarkable progress in LLMs, but I feel like we aren't allowed to be honest anymore that LLMs aren't going to replace programmers or moderate our expectations.