ByteDance launched Trae (trae.ai) on January 20, 2025. This AI programming tool is specifically designed for professional developers, aiming to enhance the automation of software development and provide a more efficient programming experience, especially with significant advantages in Chinese language support, making it a valuable assistant for Chinese developers.
Given ByteDance's product capabilities, Trae is expected to be a strong competitor to a series of trending AI programming tools like Cursor, Windsurf, Devin, and Bolt.new.
Introduction to Trae
Trae is developed by ByteDance's Singapore subsidiary SPRING(SG)PTE.LTD. It is an innovative AI integrated development environment (IDE) that incorporates major international models such as Claude-3.5-Sonnet and GPT-4o, and is currently available for free. It competes functionally with products like Cursor and Windsurf, and supports configuration migration from tools like VS Code and Cursor, making it easy for developers to get started quickly.
Currently, Trae only supports macOS, but a Windows version is in preparation and is expected to arrive soon. The interface supports both Simplified Chinese and English, providing convenience for developers with different language preferences.
Features of Trae
- Intelligent Q&A and Assistance: During coding, developers can chat with the AI assistant anytime for help with code explanations, writing comments, fixing errors, or suggesting programming patterns, providing timely and effective support like having an experienced mentor by their side.
- Real-time Code Suggestions: The AI assistant can accurately understand the current code logic and provide optimization suggestions in real time within the editor, helping developers improve code quality, reduce potential errors, and enhance code efficiency.
- Code Snippet Generation: Developers can simply describe their needs in natural language to the AI assistant, which can quickly generate corresponding code snippets, even autonomously writing project-level code involving multiple files, significantly saving time and effort on repetitive coding tasks.
- Quick Project Building: In Builder mode, developers just need to inform the AI of the type of application they want to create, and it will automatically complete various tasks for project setup, including task breakdown, file creation or modification, and generating and running commands, allowing developers to quickly create projects from scratch.
- Multimodal Interaction: With advanced multimodal capabilities, developers can upload images to express their needs, such as design sketches, reference styles, or error screenshots, and the AI can accurately understand the image content, further enhancing the accuracy of requirement expression and development efficiency.
- Comprehensive IDE Features: It includes essential IDE functions such as code writing, project management, plugin management, and version control, providing developers with a fully functional development environment to meet various needs from simple code editing to complex project management.
- Efficient Code Completion: It can quickly and intelligently predict and complete code based on developers' input and code context in real time, improving coding speed, making the development process smoother, and reducing manual input workload for developers.
Applicable Scenarios
- Web Application Development: For developing a website with image upload and compression features, Trae can generate the corresponding front-end and back-end code based on the developer's requirements, enabling functionalities like image upload, proportional compression, preview, and download, while also providing visual design suggestions that comply with various design styles, including Apple's.
- Tool Application Development: For creating an image processing tool with features like image format conversion, cropping, watermarking, and filter effects, or tools for converting PDF to Word/Excel, file format conversion, compression/decompression, JSON formatting, code beautification, regular expression testing, and timestamp conversion, Trae can assist developers in quickly completing code writing and project setup.
- Front-end Project Development: When creating a front-end project with a specific page style, such as mimicking the front-end layout and interaction effects of a well-known website, Trae can use React or other front-end frameworks along with technologies like TypeScript to generate the corresponding project files and achieve smooth animations and transitions, enhancing front-end development efficiency.
- Game Development: For developing small games like Tower of Hanoi, Snake, or New Year’s Fortune, developers can simply describe the game rules and requirements in natural language, and Trae can generate the corresponding game code, including game logic, interface rendering, and user interaction, helping developers quickly realize their game ideas.
- Assistance with Daily Programming Tasks: During routine coding, when encountering difficulties in understanding code, needing to optimize code structure, add new features, or fix errors, developers can utilize Trae's AI assistant feature anytime to quickly obtain solutions and suggestions, enhancing programming efficiency and quality.
Tutorial for Using Trae
- Visit the official Trae website (https://www.trae.ai) to download the desktop client for macOS (currently only the Mac version is available, with the Windows version expected to launch by the end of February). If you can't wait for the Windows version, you can install macOS in a virtual machine to experience it.
- After installation, click the Trae icon to launch the program. On first launch, you will enter the settings interface. Here, you can choose the Dark, Light, or DeepBlue theme and select the interface language from English or Simplified Chinese. After setting, click the Continue button.
- If you have previously used VSCode or Cursor on your PC, you can click Import from VSCode or Import from Cursor to import extensions, settings, and key bindings from these two IDEs into Trae for quick environment switching. You can also choose to skip this step.
- You can optionally install the trae command in your local terminal for future command-line launches of Trae or opening projects in Trae. For example, use the “trae” command to quickly start Trae, or “trae my-react-app” to open a specified project in Trae; this installation step can also be skipped.
- Log in to your Trae account to use the AI assistant feature. You can log in using your GitHub or Google account, or use your Trae account. If you prefer not to log in temporarily, you can skip this step, but some features may be limited.
- Once in the main interface of Trae, you can start developing projects. You can do this by:
Opening an existing folder or cloning an existing Git repository for regular project development.
Using the AI assistant to create a new project in Builder mode by opening the Builder function with the shortcut “Command + U”, entering the desired application description, and the AI will automatically build the project; in Chat mode, you can also use the shortcut “Command + U” to open the Chat function and ask questions about the codebase or programming issues at any time to get code suggestions and problem resolutions.
Conclusion
The emergence of Trae brings a new programming experience for developers. Its powerful AI capabilities, friendly support for Chinese developers, and rich applicable scenarios make it stand out among numerous programming tools. Whether you are a professional developer or a programming novice, Trae can help improve development efficiency and quickly realize your ideas.
In addition to Trae, ByteDance has previously launched the AI programming tool MarsCode and the no-code AI application development platform Coze, as part of its innovation in the AI development field. Based on ByteDance's past product strategy (Coze.com offered free access to GPT-4 during its early release), it is highly likely that ByteDance will allow users free access to the integrated GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet models in Trae for an extended period.
If you are eager to improve your programming efficiency, feel free to download Trae and give it a try. We also welcome likes, comments, and sharing of your experiences and suggestions with us as we collectively pay attention to Trae's iterations and developments!
