ByteDance launches the TRAE AI coding tool

Background

TRAE is ByteDance's AI coding product. It launched in January 2025.^[1] It brings AI assistance into programming, and during 2025 it offered a plugin, a development environment and an agent called SOLO.^[1]

Open source means that a project's code is published so that others can read, use and modify it. Publishing an agent this way lets outside researchers reproduce its results and build on its design.

SWE-bench is a family of tests that asks whether an AI system can resolve real issues taken from open-source software projects. Because the tasks come from real code, a good score says more about practical programming help than a score on a textbook exercise does.

An IDE, or integrated development environment, is a program that puts a code editor, a debugger and related tools in one place. A plugin adds features to an existing editor, while an AI agent is a system that carries out a multi-step task, such as reading a codebase, changing several files and running tests, with limited human input.

What happened

During 2025 TRAE shipped a plugin, the TRAE IDE and the SOLO agent, and released more than 100 feature updates.^[1] TRAE 2.0, with a redesigned interface, followed on 18 July 2025.^[3]

Key details

By the end of 2025 TRAE had 6 million registered users in nearly 200 countries.^[1] Users generated close to 100 billion lines of code with the product in 2025.^[1]

TRAE's open-source project, Trae Agent, is an agent built on large language models for software engineering. Its paper reports that in July 2025 the agent scored 75.20% on SWE-bench Verified, a benchmark that tests whether an AI system can fix real problems in software projects. The paper says this placed it first on the leaderboard.^[2]

Impact

The figures show that TRAE built a large user base within a year of launch. Releasing the agent as open source also made part of its technology available to researchers and developers outside the company.