TRAE

TRAE (The Real AI Engineer) is an AI native integrated development environment (IDE) launched by ByteDance at the beginning of 2025, also known as “The Real AI Engineer”. It deeply integrates advanced big language models (such as Claude series, GPT-4o/5, DeepSeek, beanbag, etc.), aiming at the deep collaboration between human and AI, so that developers (including novice zero-basic developers) can efficiently complete the development of the idea to the complete project in natural language. Currently, the official website of the international version is trae.ai, and the domestic version is trae.com.cn, which supports Mac/Windows platform and is completely free (some advanced models are free for a limited time).

The core concept of TRAE is “Dialogue is Programming”, it is not just a code editor + AI plug-in combination, but from the bottom to reconstruct the development process, let AI become your “10x engineer partner”.

Main Functions

TRAE’s functionality is centered around two core modes (which have been merged into a unified interaction interface in the new version):

1. Chat mode (side/inline dialog)
   • Ask code questions in natural language, interpret entire code base, generate/optimize code snippets, fix bugs.
   • Support for project-level contextual understanding: AI can automatically index the entire repository, track variables and logic across files.
   • Multi-modal input: you can directly upload images, error logs, and terminal outputs, so that AI can “look at the picture and talk” or directly fix the reported errors.
   • Real-time Code Comparison: The diff will be displayed when modifying the code, allowing you to accept/reject it with one click.
2. Builder Mode (Intelligent Builder/Agent Mode)
   • Complete project generation from 0 to 1: just one sentence describes the requirements (e.g. “make a short video app similar to TikTok, support uploading and recommending”), and the AI will automatically disassemble the tasks, create files, install dependencies, write code, debug and run.
   • Autonomous execution toolchain: the AI can invoke terminal commands, edit files, run tests, and even generate CI/CD scripts and optimize packaged volumes.
   • Interactive Collaboration: Each step pauses for you to confirm or tweak, it feels like a senior engineer is walking you through the code.
3. Other Core Features
   • Code Intelligence Completion and Refactoring: real-time continuation and automatic performance optimization (e.g., compute caching is recommended).
   • Built-in preview and debugging: Webview one-click preview page , terminal error one-click throw to AI repair .
   • Plug-ins and extensions: compatible with VS Code plug-in marketplace , support Remote SSH remote development .
   • Custom Rules and Intelligent Body: You can set exclusive programming specifications for AI (e.g. “all code must be added Typescript type”), or customize the exclusive Agent (similar to a private AI engineer).
   • MCP protocol support: secure access to external tools/data sources (e.g. weather API, database).

Key Features

Applicable Crowd

• Programming novices/product managers/designers: describing ideas in Chinese, you can come up with a complete project, zero threshold to realize creativity.
• Professional developers: daily efficiency tool to deal with repetitive work, complex refactoring, cross-technology stack tasks.
• Teams/Enterprises: support custom rules to ensure code style unity; collaboration features will be enhanced in the future.

Overall, TRAE is one of the strongest and most affordable AI programming tools in the Chinese community, and many users have commented that “one person can top a small team”. If you haven’t tried it yet, it is highly recommended to go to the official website to download and experience it – starting from a simple Todo list or a small program, you will immediately feel the shock of the programming threshold being completely lowered!