TikTok's owner forked Microsoft's Visual Studio Code and concerns have been raised — reports suggest it's resource heavy and never stops 'phoning home'

You're probably familiar with Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code), but did you know about Trae? It's a fork of VS Code, well, the actually open-source parts of VS Code, without Microsoft's proprietary bits slapped on top. It's not the first, and it won't be the last.

Trae comes from ByteDance, best known, in the west at least, as the owner of TikTok. It's billed — as it seems everything is these days — as your new best AI friend, with a focus on writing code.

However, a report digging into Trae a little deeper, as reported by Neowin, has revealed a couple of troubling issues. One of which, it seems, has at least since been improved upon.

The full report is posted on GitHub by user segmentationf4u1t. The key takeways are summarized as:

• Resource usage is 6x higher than VSCode baseline
• Telemetry settings appear to be cosmetic rather than functional
• Community feedback mechanisms are compromised by censorship
• Data collection practices lack transparency and user control

It should be noted that the testing was done on a prior version, and the resource usage issue seems to be improved upon. It's not perfect, as even just looking myself this morning, the latest version of Trae is using significantly more RAM than VS Code while editing the exact same files.

The bottom three though are potentially more alarming to anyone who considers using Trae. With telemetry disabled, it's still reported that Trae is still actively contacting ByteDance servers, recorded at around 500 in a seven-minute timeframe.

Furthermore, with telemetry disabled, the report goes on to show that Trae is sending detailed usage and user activity data back to the servers.

The icing on the cake, though, is the apparent censorship going down discussing the topic in the Trae Discord server. The author of the report claims to have been given a "gag-hammer" after raising it, and that talk of tracking results in week-long muting.

The word "track" has apparently been added to a blacklist to stop people talking about it.

Here's the thing, though. Whether there's a legitimate concern, a mistake, a misunderstanding, whatever it may be, transparency with the user base is critical.

If you're making a piece of software built for coders, and you don't expect those same coders to poke around, raise concerns such as this, you probably shouldn't be making this type of software.

ByteDance hasn't actually, at this point, addressed the report or discussions about it. They're legitimate concerns. If you're allowing users to turn off telemetry, turn it off, right? And it's a really bad look when you're shutting down discussions on the topic. That makes it look like you're hiding something.

Even without looking at the AI side of things, Trae looks like it could be a decent code editor. It uses the Open VSX Registry for VS Code-compatible extensions, it hooks into WSL just the same as Microsoft's does, and the visual tweaks, while subtle, actually make for a nicer looking experience.

But ByteDance needs to come clean and talk to its users, and potential users. If there are mistakes, acknowledge and address them. If they're not mistakes, justify them. Coders are not TikTok creators, they're going to want a deeper level of explanation.