ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, recently launched Trae, a new AI-powered code editor that offers unlimited free access to DeepSeek R1 and Claude 3.7 Sonnet large language models. Trae has both an international and domestic version, supports Visual Studio Code plug-ins, and competes with an increasing line of AI code editors (e.g., Cursor, Windsurf, PearAI, Replit).
Trae has two primary modes: the Builder mode, and the Chat mode. The Builder mode supports zero-to-one application development. In this mode, developers provide natural language specifications to Trae, which builds an application from the ground up, creating files and folders with the implementing code.
The Chat mode analyzes existing code, answers questions, provides suggestions and delivers real-time recommendations and code completions within the editor.
Trae’s domestic version targets Chinese developers, is equipped with Doubao-1.5-pro, an AI reasoning model matching Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks, and lets users switch between the full-fledged DeepSeek R1 and V3 models. Trae’s international version recently made Claude 3.7 Sonnet available for use.
Website aibase.com claims that access to Claude is free and unlimited:
ByteDance, through its AI programming software Trae, is making Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the world’s first “hybrid reasoning model,” freely available to all users. As revealed in a post by X user @geekshellio this morning (06:24 PST): “ByteDance Trae is making a big move! Claude3.7 is now available for unlimited free use!”
Trae’s privacy policy states that, while codebase files are stored locally on the user’s devices, Trae will temporarily upload to their servers to compute embeddings. Upon completion, all plaintext code would be permanently deleted but the embeddings and associated metadata would be kept. Additionally, the policy makes it clear that it collects any information (including any code snippets) that the user chooses to input. The user’s personal information may be stored on a server located outside of the user’s country of residence, with servers located in the United States, Singapore, and Malaysia.
Importantly, the policy states that “certain entities within our corporate group […] process Information You Provide, Automatically Collected Information, and Information From Other Sources for us, as necessary to provide functions such as storage, content delivery, security, research and development, analytics, online payments, customer and technical support, and content moderation.” It thus remains possible that the embeddings computed from the temporary uploaded user files are shared with the unspecified entities of the corporate group.
The latter point is relevant for companies or users who have high requirements in terms of privacy, intellectual property, or security. Libraries such as vec2text allow recovering the original text from its corresponding embeddings. The library’s authors explained a year ago in a talk titled Text Embeddings Reveal (Almost) As Much As Text that 92% of most short texts (inferior to 32 tokens) can be reconstructed with perfect accuracy. While the accuracy of reconstruction drops with the length of text, the reconstructed text still often leaks valid portions of the original text. Assessing and mitigating text embedding inversion is a current topic of research.
Trae is a fork of Microsoft’s popular open-source IDE and text editor Visual Studio Code. As such, most, if not all, of Visual Studio Code plugins can be reused in Trae. As part of the initial setup, users can import their existing Visual Studio Code plugins and settings.
One Reddit user noted:
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”.
Another user answered as follows:
Nah the extension API is pretty limited. Copilot uses proprietary APIs 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)
Another developer mentioned enjoying the coding experience:
It’s surprisingly very good. The AI responses are very good, and it’s free to use. They don’t charge anything for claude-3.5-sonnet. I also love its UI even though they totally copied JetBrains Fleet’s UI.
Trae is available on both Macs and PCs. Developers can refer to the online documentation for support.
.jpg)
