Trae
Also known as: Trae IDE, The Real AI Engineer
Trae launched in early 2025 as a direct free alternative to Cursor and Windsurf. Built on VS Code (Microsoft's popular open-source editor), it feels familiar to most developers from day one: your extensions and keyboard shortcuts carry over. The main draw is cost. Trae's free tier includes access to frontier models like Claude and GPT-4o, which competing tools charge $20 or more per month to unlock.
Its standout feature is Builder Mode, an autonomous agent that takes a natural-language description of your project and scaffolds the entire thing: frontend, backend, and config files. For solo developers and rapid prototypers, that's a real time-saver. Trae also supports MCP (the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI to external tools and data sources) and custom agents.
The meaningful catch is data privacy. Trae collects extensive telemetry that is shared with ByteDance affiliates, retains personal data for five years after account closure, and offers no opt-out. For hobby projects or learning exercises that's usually fine. For proprietary code or client work, it warrants a harder look at whether the trade-off makes sense for your situation.