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AI-Powered Trae IDE Ships from Chinese TikTok Owner: 'It Looks To Be a Fork'
As Chinese AI tech shakes up the entire industry with new breakthroughs, a new AI-powered IDE from a Beijing firm is flying under the radar, apparently based on the same tech that powers Visual Studio Code and many other code editors.
Compared with other IDE announcements, little is known about the new IDE, called Trae, from ByteDance (the owner of TikTok). One early report came in a Chinese-language post on Jan. 20 whose AI-translated headline equates to "ByteDance launched Trae, an AI programming tool for overseas use, which supports Chinese language."
[Click on image for larger view.] Trae (source: ByteDance).
"Trae is your helpful coding partner," says the site. "It offers features like AI Q&A, code auto-completion, and agent-based AI programming capabilities. When developing projects with Trae, you can collaborate with AI to enhance your development efficiency." Although the site doesn't mention the offering is open sourced, a notice lists tons of open-source code used.
IDE functionalities include code writing, project management, extension management, version control, and more, with documentation specifically listing:
- AI Q&A: While coding, you can chat with the AI assistant at any time to seek help regarding coding, including asking the AI assistant to explain code, write code comments, fix errors, and more.
- Real-time code suggestions: The AI assistant will understand the current code and provide suggested code in real-time within the editor.
- Code snippet generation: By describing your needs in natural language to the AI assistant, it will generate the corresponding code snippets or autonomously write project-level and cross-file code.
- 0 to 1 project development: Tell the AI assistant what kind of program you want to develop, and it will provide the corresponding code or automatically create related files based on your description.
Four days ago, a Hacker News post announced the new IDE, followed the next day by more discussion.
There, some of the talk focused on the new IDE's tech, which is now available for macOS but not Windows, for which there is a waitlist. Various industry discussions speculated it was based on Electron, an open source project that spawned several code editors/IDEs, including Visual Studio Code. When one users asked if Trae was based on Electron or Rust, another user replied, "It appears to be a VSCode fork, and supports VSC marketplace extensions, so I would guess Electron." Another agreed: "It looks to be a fork, as other comments and the license list seem to indicate."
Another user questioned the logic of using this tool in the wake of the current controversy around TikTok, ByteDance's social media service. A federal law was passed calling for ByteDance to sell its U.S. operations, though that has been put on hold after the service was shut down briefly.
"Who would ever allow this in their organisation after the tiktok shutdown, just go for one of the other 17 ai IDE forks," the user wrote.
Discussion about Trae is continuing even as the AI space is reeling from a new Chinese AI model called DeepSeek, arriving with capabilities rivaling the best, reportedly at a fraction of the cost. That has sent some AI-related stocks tumbling.
Read those HN discussions (more than 450 comments and counting) for more comparisons with other AI tech like Copilot and other editors/IDEs like Cursor.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.