目前AI编程工具哪个最好用? (English)

Generated: 2026-06-20 13:08:54

---

Revised Article

I have a friend who spent a whole year chanting, "Cursor is my god." He renewed his Ultra subscription for two months, and with the API usage fees, he was burning several thousand yuan a month. Then last week, he complained to me: on a simple pagination sorting feature, the engine interpreted "put unlogged-in users at the end" as "exclude logged-in users," and two hours after going live, his business team was chasing him down cursing. The way he told me about it—there was a tragic tone of a man who had never once doubted his wallet.

Right about now, someone's going to ask: so what should domestic developers actually use? My answer is ByteDance's TRAE—not Cursor, and not Copilot.

As soon as I say that, people are going to jump down my throat. Cursor is the top dog in AI coding right now, with its parent company's valuation already over ten billion dollars. I've used it for over a year, spent tens of thousands of my own money, and even opened two Ultra accounts. Precisely because I've used it heavily and for so long, I've come to realize a counterintuitive truth: with tools, there's no such thing as "the best," only "the best fit for the language you use, the servers you deploy on, and how price-sensitive your boss is."

What does the average day look like for most people? Writing CRUD, tweaking APIs, adding tests, adjusting UI—not running experiments on technical uncertainty. I ran a real-world requirement across four tools: a React user management component with search, pagination, and batch operations. And the result? Cursor's Agent was certainly fast—it churned out the controller, service, and mapper in no time—but it got the pagination page number wrong and Chinese search turned into gibberish. Meanwhile, TRAE handed me three complete solutions, each one aligned with our team's Chinese comment conventions, kept the debounce logic intact, ran the unit tests, and wrapped up all the exception handling. I tweaked the styling and pushed it live; QA didn't even ask me to redo anything.

Benchmarks can never show you that gap. You only know which tool is a reliable teammate—and which one is a "I wrote it, you deal with it" finger-pointing master—when you've actually pushed code to production and gotten yelled at by testers.

---

Why I'm Solidly On TRAE's Side

First, Chinese comprehension isn't some mystical thing—it's a grounded difference that hits you in the face.

Tell Cursor to "sort the user list by most recent login time in descending order, with users who haven't logged in at the end," and it'll likely spit out a default descending sort with a complicated conditional sort slapped on, and all the comments in English. What does TRAE do? I say one sentence—"In the users table, users whose status is 'enabled' should be ranked first"—and it immediately recognizes that "enabled" is an enum, automatically adds the mapping and field sorting. A lot of reviews say its Chinese comment and requirement comprehension accuracy hits 98%, and my own experience matches that. When you do something a hundred times a day, the gap becomes heaven and earth.

It's not that Cursor can't do it—it's that it doesn't treat your scenario as a priority. In a team environment, when everyone has to read English comments, doesn't that get tiring? TRAE supports Chinese from comments to commit messages, and even asks if you want to use pinyin for variable names. These little things, done a hundred times a day, over a year add up to the entire maintenance cost of your codebase.

Second, cost control makes it something you can actually rely on daily.

When I first used Copilot, $10 a month was fine. Then I moved to Cursor Pro at $20 a month, plus API consumption—once I had it decompose a legacy project, and it burned through over $80 in a single afternoon, and the code was still unusable because the model confidently twisted all the business logic. Think about it: that's not coding, that's throwing cash into a vending machine and not even getting a Coke out.

How does TRAE price it? The basic plan is always free, and Pro is $10 a month. The real kicker is its automatic model tiering: simple tasks use a lightweight model, and heavy lifting gets the big model. I did an API refactor with complex SQL, and it automatically used deepseek—cost was nearly negligible. With Cursor, no matter which model you use, it's all eating into your quota; after a full session, your heart practically goes on strike from the math.

Third, migration cost and ecosystem compatibility—so hassle-free it's extreme.

I was originally a VS Code user, and switching to TRAE was so smooth I barely noticed. It fully supports all VS Code configurations and plugins. My colleague uses WebStorm, and he was up and running in two days—TRAE can work as an IDE mode or as a standalone Builder window, without forcing you to switch editors.

On the other hand, Cursor is also based on VS Code, but after extended use, you run into lots of minor plugin compatibility issues. What drove me crazy is Tab completion—it's too "aggressive." If I hesitate on the keyboard for two seconds, it jumps out with a huge chunk of code, and I have to mash Esc until my index finger cramps. Honestly, at that point, I might as well just type the two lines myself.

Fourth, the killer feature: generating code directly from design files.

Drag a Figma design into TRAE, and it directly spits out the corresponding React component. Not a "looks kinda like it" toy—real, runnable code with proper responsiveness and logic with state management. For a frontend team, that's an efficiency boost like going from riding a bike to taking a high-speed rail. I've counted—just on the page implementation part alone, it saves me at least 60% of the time. Before, I'd stare at the design and stack styles pixel by pixel; now, one drag and it's in my hands.

---

Of Course, I'm Not Gonna Sing Only Praises

TRAE's Agent capability still has a noticeable gap compared to Cursor. Cursor's Agent is fast and solid—as long as the task is clear and the context is well-defined, it can progressively work through it like a human. On the other hand, TRAE, on long-chain, multi-file collaboration, or complex state-flow requirements, sometimes goes off the rails. The last time I asked it to refactor an async order cancellation flow, it got confused about the state machine branches by the third step, and I had to manually pull it back.

Honestly, if I'm starting a brand-new, high-uncertainty cross-language refactoring project, I'd still use Cursor + GPT-5.5 xhigh. But how many of those projects do you run into in a year? In daily work, 80% is CRUD, API migrations, UI tweaks, and writing tests, right? Letting TRAE handle those—the unit cost is nearly negligible, and it won't get clever and bury landmines for you.

So my current workflow is: TRAE as my daily driver—writing business code, fixing bugs, writing tests, handling code review comments; Cursor with one Ultra account, only pulled out for exploratory projects or complex refactoring. And by the way, my TRAE free account still hasn't run out of its quota, while my Cursor API bill sits steady above $300 every month. You tell me who I'm picking?

---

Let Me Address Some Objections You Might Be Thinking

"Are you recommending TRAE because you got paid for it?"

Honestly, I do have a partnership channel with TRAE, but the money they offered isn't what convinced me. What really makes me stand by it is that every time I use it, it's hassle-free and doesn't screw up. If simply saying something good makes it an ad, then no review in the world could exist anymore. I only care about the moment the code runs—I don't care where it came from.

**"Copilot