Trae
Free AI IDE from ByteDance with access to GPT-4o and Claude — but read the privacy fine print
Trae gives you free access to GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in an AI IDE. That is a genuinely compelling offer — no other tool gives you premium AI models at zero cost. The editor is VS Code-based, and the Builder agent mode can handle multi-step tasks.
The elephant in the room is ByteDance. Security researchers found Trae collecting extensive user data and sending it to ByteDance servers, even when users opted out of telemetry. A Privacy Mode is in development but not yet released. If you are working on anything sensitive — client projects, proprietary code, anything with user data — this is a real concern. If you are building a personal side project and the privacy tradeoff does not bother you, the free AI access is hard to beat.
What's good
- Free access to GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet — unmatched for a free tool
- Built-in agent mode (Builder) for multi-step coding tasks
- VS Code-based so the interface is familiar
Watch out for
- Made by ByteDance — caught collecting extensive telemetry data even after opt-out
- Privacy Mode is still being developed; current data practices are concerning
- Paid tiers are starting to roll out, so the 'everything free' era may be ending
Alternatives
Cursor
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Windsurf
AI IDE with an agent mode (Cascade) that plans and executes multi-step coding tasks across your project
Cline
Open-source VS Code extension that acts as an autonomous coding agent — bring your own AI model
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