Bytedance (parent company of TikTok) has recently unveiled a new IDE that is free for everyone to use. The word TRAE is a catchy wordplay for The Real AI Engineer.
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What is TRAE?
It is the newest piece of technology that helps you in your everyday programming tasks. It is currently in beta and you can use it for absolutely free. That is with no costs at all.
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Why should you care about TRAE?
TRAE was introduced for public use in January 23, 2025. It is a direct competition to the already existing IDE known as Cursor, but it’s different from Cursor in a sense that AI is currently free in TRAE IDE. And with that Cursor costs you some money and if you’re not paying then there are limitations.
Here’s what you can expect in free version of Cursor2,000 completions/month.
- 2,000 completions/month
- 50 slow premium requests/month
- Pro features unlocked for a two-week trial
- Download capability
On the other hand TRAE is absolutely free with no limitations.
Features of TRAE
You might think okay? But what are the benefits of using TRAE instead of paying to Cursor. Here are a few of them taken directly from the TRAE’s website.
* You can chat with your source code faster than any other IDE. Meaning it will boost your speed of coding by a great measure.
* You can upload images too in the chat, which will help you to clarify your requirements. The IDE will then try to create things for you as close to the image description as possible.
* TRAE will look into whole project instead of scoped files. Which means that TRAE will be able to assist you in a more informative way as it has access to your entire codebase. Let’s say you might want to use a method call from a certain file nested 3 levels deep? TRAE got it covered for you.
* IT’S ABSOLUTELY FREE, as per it’s official documentation until it’s STABLE RELEASE.
* The code completions are incredibly smart. Meaning it understands your codebase much better than anything else.
* It’s open source, with MIT Licensing
What are the disadvantages of TRAE?
It all sound really good to be true, but like everything TRAE might have some limitations or issues. I’ve listed a few of them below.
It is currently in beta phase, which could lead to inaccurate suggestions and completions. It might contain a lot of bugs that might hinder your productivity. Therefore, it is recommended to not use this at your production projects.
The software is only free during the beta testing phase. Meaning if you get addicted to this software in it’s current state. You might have to pay certain amount of money for using it. That will be counter intuitive as there are less costly options for you to code without money or with less money.
The biggest one is that it’s only available for Mac right now. As per some sources they have planned release for windows, but the release date is not yet revealed. We might have to wait it out.
Conclusion
This leads us to the question; should you use TRAE the AI IDE?
The obvious answer is yes, you should try it out just to check out what it can do for you. you can try building side projects using this new piece technology, it could help you complete weeks worth of tasks in matter of hours.
