ByteDance launches AI code editor based on Microsoft software as TikTok ban is delayed

The Chinese owner of TikTok rolled out the new software targeting overseas Chinese coders after a reprieve from the Trump administration

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ByteDance’s office in Singapore on March 6, 2024. The Singapore-based subsidiary Spring (SG) Pte is responsible for distributing the company’s new coding software Trae. Photo: Harvey Kong

Published: 5:30pm, 21 Jan 2025

ByteDance has launched an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered code editor in competition with American leaders like Cursor and Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, just after US President Donald Trump delayed the enforcement of a law requiring the company to divest TikTok.

The new integrated development environment (IDE), named Trae, is specifically targeted at overseas markets. It allows programmers to chat with an AI assistant while coding and generate code snippets or write project-level code based on natural language prompts.

The tool’s AI features are powered by either OpenAI’s GPT-4o or Anthropic’s Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and these features are currently free to use. The user interface supports English and Chinese, as many overseas programmers are from China. The company has not mentioned whether it plans to support additional languages.

The program has launched on Apple’s macOS and a version for Microsoft Windows is in the works, according to the website. The software is distributed by ByteDance’s Singapore-based subsidiary Spring (SG) Pte, the company behind its Cici chatbot that launched in 2023.

ByteDance’s Trae is a fork of Microsoft’s popular Visual Studio Code. Photo: Trae

Like Cursor, Trae is a fork of Microsoft’s popular open-source IDE and text editor Visual Studio Code, which now has GitHub Copilot baked into it. The software is built on Electron, a cross-platform framework that uses web standards based on Google’s Chromium.