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. Essentially, VS Code runs 9 process with 0.9GB of memory utilized, Cursor runs 11 processes with 1.9GB memory, whereas Trae ran 33 processes with a staggering 5.7GB of memory consumed.
When the person reported their findings to ByteDance, the company acknowledged the issue and rolled out version 2.0.2 with some fixes. However, the IDE still runs 13 processes with a RAM utilization of 2.5GB.
The other interesting observation made during these tests was that Trae maintains persistent outbound connections to ByteDance servers in regular use. Even when telemetry was disabled, the IDE maintains connections to some servers and actually makes more calls to them while also sending more than the usual payload. The conductor of the analysis notes that even after disabling telemetry, the IDE established calls with the server 500 times in 7 minutes and sent roughly 26MB of data.
An investigation into the transmitted packages indicated that even when telemetry was disabled, the IDE sent the following information:
- System Information: Hardware specs, OS details, architecture
- Usage Patterns: Active time, session duration, feature usage
- Performance Metrics: Response times, resource consumption
- Unique Identifiers: Machine ID, user ID, device fingerprints
- Workspace Details: Project information, file paths (obfuscated)
When segmentationf4u1t highlighted these concerns in Trae's Discord server, they were treated with a "gag hammer". Other restrictions in the server include the word "track" being added to a blacklist, an instant 7-day mute as soon as you mention anything relating to tracking, and the mods treating any discussion around the topic as disruptive behavior.
The investigation's results have sparked a lively debate over on the Hacker News forums, where some are questioning the accuracy of the tests while others are arguing in their favor. ByteDance is yet to respond to the claims, but the findings are certainly suspicious, to say the least.
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