Hi HN, I was evaluating IDEs for a personal project and decided to test Trae, ByteDance's fork of VSCode. I immediately noticed some significant performance and privacy issues that I felt were worth sharing. I've written up a full analysis with screenshots, network logs, and data payloads in the linked post.
Here are the key findings:
1. Extreme Resource Consumption: Out of the box, Trae used 6.3x more RAM (~5.7 GB) and spawned 3.7x more processes (33 total) than a standard VSCode setup with the same project open. The team has since made improvements, but it's still significantly heavier.
2. Telemetry Opt-Out Doesn't Work (It Makes It Worse): I found Trae was constantly sending data to ByteDance servers (byteoversea.com). I went into the settings and disabled all telemetry. To my surprise, this didn't stop the traffic. In fact, it increased the frequency of batch data collection. The telemetry "off" switch appears to be purely cosmetic.
3. What's Being Sent: Even with telemetry "disabled," Trae sends detailed payloads including: Hardware specs (CPU, memory, etc.) Persistent user, device, and machine IDs OS version, app language, user name Granular usage data like time-on-ide, window focus state, and active file types.
4. Community Censorship: When I tried to discuss these findings on their official Discord, my posts were deleted and my account was muted for 7 days. It seems words like "track" trigger an automated gag rule, which prevents any real discussion about privacy.
I believe developers should be aware of this behavior. The combination of resource drain, non-functional privacy settings, and censorship of technical feedback is a major red flag. The full, detailed analysis with all the evidence (process lists, Fiddler captures, JSON payloads, and screenshots of the Discord moderation) is available at the link. Happy to answer any questions.
TL;DR: Because of the bullshit asymmetry principle. Maybe the conclusions below are sound, have a read and try to wade through ;-)
Let us address the underlying assumptions and implications in the argument that the provenance of a report, specifically whether it was written with the assistance of AI, should not matter as long as the conclusions are sound.
This position, while intuitively appealing in its focus on the end result, overlooks several important dimensions of communication, trust, and epistemic responsibility. The process by which information is generated is not merely a trivial detail, it is a critical component of how that information is evaluated, contextualized, and ultimately trusted by its audience. The notion that it feels wrong is not simply a matter of subjective discomfort, but often reflects deeper concerns about transparency, accountability, and the potential for subtle biases or errors introduced by automated systems.
In academic, journalistic, and technical contexts, the methodology is often as important as the findings themselves. If a report is generated or heavily assisted by AI, it may inherit certain limitations, such as a lack of domain-specific nuance, the potential for hallucinated facts, or the unintentional propagation of biases present in the training data. Disclosing the use of AI is not about stigmatizing the tool, but about providing the audience with the necessary context to critically assess the reliability and limitations of the information presented. This is especially pertinent in environments where accuracy and trust are paramount, and where the audience may need to know whether to apply additional scrutiny or verification.
Transparency about the use of AI is a matter of intellectual honesty and respect for the audience. When readers are aware of the tools and processes behind a piece of writing, they are better equipped to interpret its strengths and weaknesses. Concealing or omitting this information, even unintentionally, can erode trust if it is later discovered, leading to skepticism not just about the specific report, but about the integrity of the author or institution as a whole.
This is not a hypothetical concern, there are numerous documented cases (eg in legal filings https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/) where lack of disclosure about AI involvement has led to public backlash or diminished credibility. Thus, the call for transparency is not a pedantic demand, but a practical safeguard for maintaining trust in an era where the boundaries between human and machine-generated content are increasingly blurred.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
* (which, btw, are at https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)
JetBrains products. Can work fully offline and they don't send "telemetry" if you're a paying user: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/settings-usage-statisti...
It was rough a few years ago, but nowadays it's pretty nice. TI rebuilt their Code Composer Studio using Theia so it does have some larger users. It has LSP support and the same Monaco editor backend - which is all I need.
It's VSCode-with-an-Eclipse-feel to it - which might or might not be your cup of tea, but it's an alternative.
It's clear that this isn't what OP was doing. The LLM was writing, not merely translating. dang put it well:
> we want people to speak in their own voice
> debuggers
>> DAP
> popup context windows for docs
> contextual buttons on a line of code
> minimap
The "minimap" is the only one here that isn't native. You can also have the file tree on the left if you want. Most people tend to use NerdTree[4], but like with a lot of plugins, there's builtins that are just as good. Here's the help page for netrw[5], vim's native File Explorer
Btw, this all works in vim. No need for neovim for any of this stuff. Except for the debugger, this stuff has been here for quite some time. The debugger has been around as a plugin for awhile too. All this stuff has been here since I started using vim, which was over a decade ago (maybe balloons didn't have as good of an interface? Idk, it's been awhile)
[0] https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/debugger.html
[1] https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/options.html#'balloon...
[2] https://github.com/wfxr/minimap.vim
[3] https://github.com/preservim/tagbar
Even if we interact with your rhetoric[1] at face value, there is a big difference between data going to your own elected government versus that of a foreign adversary.
It should be a crime for Google as well.
"Whataboutism" is a logical fallacy.
https://github.com/grafana/tempo/discussions/5001#discussion...
(Yes, that's for Grafana tempo, but the issue in `grafana/grafana` was just marked as duplicate of this.)
* https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/languages/markdown#_inser...
> [balloons] are not interactive as far as I know
> [tabbar is] still restricted to terminal characters (you could probably do something fancy with sixel,
> For example options to refactor based on the current location.
Second, sure, I refactor all the time. There's 3 methods I know. The best way is probably with bufdo and having all the files opened in a buffer (tabs, windows, or panes are not required). But I'm not sure why this is surprising. Maybe you don't know what ctags are? If not, they are what makes all that possible and I'd check them out because I think it will answer a lot of your questions.
> Basically where's the "extract this as named constant", "rename this type across the project"
But honestly, I really can't tell if you're just curious or trying to defend your earlier position. I mean if you're curious and want to learn more we can totally continue and I'm sure others would love to add more. And in that case I would avoid language like "vim doesn't" and instead phrase it as "can vim ___?", "how would I do ____ in vim?", or "I find ___ useful in VS code, how do people do this in vim?" Any of those will have the same result but not be aggressive. But if you're just trying to defend your position, well... Sun Tzu said you should know your enemy and I don't think you know your enemy.
[0] https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Browsing_programs_with_tags
[1] https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Search_and_replace_in_multiple_b...
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=redhat.j...
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
It’s easy to argue that if you are a PowerShell user or developer you benefit from no telemetry, but it’s hard to argue that you benefit from the tool you use being sidelined or defunded because corporate thinks nobody uses it. “Talk to your users” doesn’t solve this because there are millions of computers running scripts and no way to know who they are or contact them even if you could contact that many people, and they would not remember how often they launched it.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
I'm not defending Trae’s telemetry — just pointing out the hard truth about why pricing works and why many people care less about privacy concerns (all because there are no better alternatives for them, considering the price.)
By the way, for those who care more about pricing($7.5/M) — here you go: https://www.trae.ai/. It’s still not as good as Cursor overall (just my personal opinion), but it’s quite capable now and is evolving fast — they even changed their logo in a very short time. Maybe someday it could be as competitive as Cursor — or even more so.
I work at Apple, so I’m not concerned about being monitored—it’s all company-owned equipment and data anyway.
It was the same when I worked at Microsoft. I used Microsoft products exclusively, regardless of any potential privacy concerns.
Employees at Google and Amazon do the same. It’s known as “dogfooding”—using your own products to test and improve them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food).
As for why people outside these companies use their products, it usually comes down to two reasons: a) Their employer has purchased licenses and wants employees to use them, either for compliance or to get value from the investment; or b) They genuinely like the product—whether it’s because of its features, price, performance, support, or overall experience.
Would be sad if wrong one is murdered.
(Scroll down to Selected Tools based on Eclipse Theia)
It is kid of hard to avoid nowadays.
Here a session with him related to VSCode history,
"The Story of Visual Studio Code with Erich Gamma and Kai Maetzel"
I don't do Web Development, I live in the trenches. Since I don't own a desktop system anymore, I don't honestly game.
I'm exposed to them via systemd and Linux Kernel, yes, but at least both are licensed with GPL.
At least I'm trying to minimize my exposure.
For more context, please see >>44634786
Thanks for the video, btw. I'll take a look the moment I have time.
Anonymization is usually a lie:
Also please stop with security/privacy nihilism, >>27897975
https://neovim.io/doc/user/lsp.html#vim.lsp.buf.rename() (HN seems to not link the () part, you have to add it yourself)
All the other similar fanciness like renaming a file and automatically updating module references is also provided by the LSP, and is also available in nvim.
Please see hn guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Luckily for you (and many others) there is no requirement that points be coherent.
Bash isn't better.
> "Why are you worried about the problems that scripts face? Why do they matter to you?"
because I write and run such scripts.
> "Let the corporation suffer then"
Microsoft wouldn't suffer, PowerShell users would suffer.
> "sometimes that might mean filing a bug report... or a feature request for better documentation. "
In this scenario the PowerShell team has been defunded or sacked. Who will the bug report go to? Who will implement the feature request?
> "If your users aren't interacting with you for feature requests and bug reports, then either you don't have users or you don't have good enough reachability from the users to you."
Users are interacting with Microsoft for feature requests and bug reports. There are a thousand open issues on https://github.com/powershell/powershell/ and many more which were closed "due to inactivity". What difference does that make if Corporate doesn't want to fund a bigger team to fix more bugs unless it can be shown to benefit a lot of customers not just "a few" devs who raise issues?
I belong to the class of people who believe in customising their tools as they please. So I'd have written an Emacs package to do this. But then again, this is Emacs, so someone's probably already done it. Oh, here it is: https://github.com/mooreryan/markdown-dnd-images
The community mod already told him the real reason — it was triggered by the keyword “token”, which has been flagged due to repeated crypto bot spam in the past. But instead, he deliberately claimed it was because of the word “track,” and framed a basic anti-spam automod as “censorship” and “punishment.”
https://github.com/segmentationf4u1t/trae_telemetry_research...
It honestly feels like an attention grab. That kind of intentional misrepresentation is pretty dishonest. And if you check the message history, he was actively chatting in the group before — no one was silencing him.