A detailed investigation into the VS Code fork, Trae, developed by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has revealed that the IDE is a resource hog and spies on you even when telemetry is disabled.
We recently learned that Microsoft is planning a major upgrade for Viual Studio to make the integrated development environment (IDE) more AI-focused. While Visual Studio is the company’s flagship IDE, it also offers a lightweight code editor in the form of Visual Studio Code (VS Code). Major components of VS Code are open-source, which means that people can fork it and build on top of it with their own customizations. Anysphere’s Cursor and ByteDance’s Trae IDE are two examples of VS Code’s forks.
Now, an analysis into Trae, recently made available by TikTok developer ByteDance, has revealed some problematic details about the fork. Testing conducted and published by segmentationf4u1t on GitHub indicates that prior to the release of Trae version 2.0.2, the IDE was consuming 6.3x the memory of the baseline VS Code, while also running almost four times more processes.
