Tongyi Lingma (Qoder CN)

What it is

Tongyi Lingma is Alibaba Cloud's AI coding assistant. The company's page for the product is now titled Qoder CN and describes the family as upgraded from Lingma for coding scenarios^[1]. The Lingma name therefore still identifies the product line, while Qoder CN is the name under which the current, broader offering is presented.

What the family contains

The page lists five parts: the Qoder agent workbench; a Qoder IDE, offered together with a JetBrains plugin and a CLI; Qoder Cloud Agents, a fully managed platform; a Qoder Agent SDK; and a digital-worker product called QoderWake^[1].

The IDE, the JetBrains plugin and the CLI are presented as offering deep codebase understanding and end-to-end delivery of engineering tasks^[1]. Those two phrases describe the aim of the tools rather than a single feature: an assistant that reads a whole repository rather than only the open file, and that carries a task through to a finished change instead of stopping at a line of suggested code. The workbench, the managed cloud platform, the SDK and QoderWake extend the same idea past the editor — into agent-style task execution, into programmatic access from other software, and into work handled by a software "worker".

Models and plans

Alibaba Cloud says the product supports switching between Chinese models, including GLM, DeepSeek and MiniMax^[1]. A user is therefore not tied to a single model inside the assistant.

Three plans are published, each including 3,000 credits per seat per month:

• Team: 99 yuan per seat per month, sold from a single seat^[1].
• Enterprise standard: 149 yuan per seat per month, sold from 10 seats^[1].
• Dedicated enterprise: 199 yuan per seat per month, sold from 50 seats^[1].

The entry point of one seat and the ceiling of fifty show that the same product is sold both to individuals and small teams and to larger organisations buying in bulk, with the price per seat rising as the plan moves toward dedicated deployment.

Evaluations and recognition

Alibaba Cloud states that it is the only Chinese vendor in the Challenger quadrant of Gartner's research on AI code assistants, and that Qoder CN is the only Chinese coding assistant product to reach that quadrant^[1]. The company also states that the product passed the CAICT AI code model evaluation at the highest level, and the trusted AI coding tool evaluation with a 4+ rating^[1].

In July 2024 the product was chosen as a highlight exhibit at the World AI Conference, the first AI coding assistant to be selected^[1].

Where it sits

Two things stand out in the way the product is described. First, the scope: a coding assistant that carried a single product name is now a family spanning an editor, a plugin, a command line, a managed cloud platform, an SDK and a digital-worker product^[1]. Second, the audience: the plans, the choice of models and the evaluation results are all framed around Chinese models and around organisational purchase rather than around a single developer trying a tool.

For readers who know it by the older name, the practical point is that Tongyi Lingma and Qoder CN refer to one line of work: the earlier coding assistant, now sold and documented as a larger set of tools^[1].