After two days with Trae, I'm more willing to pay for Cursor! • Lucky Snail

Hello everyone! I’m luckySnail. I actually started using AI-assisted programming quite early on, and I’ve tried many AI tools, from the early Devv to Tongyi Lingma, and most recently Cursor. I’ve witnessed the evolution of AI coding from a primitive stage to a mature one. Below are some articles I’ve recorded and shared about AI programming, one of which even made it to the Juejin hot list (and got some backlash).

This reminds me of a book review I read back in my school days, which I think fits perfectly here:

Let me share some of the advantages I discovered in Cursor while using Trae — there really is no comparison without contrast!

Trae Experience

After Trae was updated, a friend recommended that it had become usable and I should give it a try. I had used it before and felt it still fell far short of Cursor, but since it was recommended, I figured I’d test it out. I was happy to see a product from a domestic team, so I decided to support it!

But right after I paid and updated the editor, I noticed my Claude model was gone! Can you imagine the feeling of having something you just paid for vanish? It felt like being scammed. After some tinkering, I found others had the same issue, and after emailing support I learned that the Claude model was disabled for the Hong Kong/Macau region. Shouldn’t they have mentioned that beforehand?

When I asked my first question, it just threw an error right away:

All I could think of was that “Refund!” meme. But okay, I’ll bear with it — I already paid, I can’t just let it slide. The rest of the experience was pure agony, mainly in these aspects:

No Git-related capabilities — can’t review code or use the current workspace as context.
Builder mode sometimes only gives suggestions without directly modifying the content.
Occasional weird UI and operational bugs.
Unnecessary changes — for example, why hide the original editor settings so deep?

The feature that really made me want to run away was the auto-completion. Cursor truly understands programmers — it knows how to write code, it knows what you’re about to do next, and its Tab completions always take me exactly where I want to go. I think that’s Cursor’s moat. But Trae’s auto-completion is really poor — it feels even worse than some plugin-level auto-completions. Let me give some examples:

When I copy code from xiaohongshu.ts and paste it into tiktok.ts for editing, in Cursor, it automatically renames identifiers like xiaohongshu to tiktok.
When I modify something, and there’s a similar change needed elsewhere below, Cursor automatically shows a Tab hint indicating the same change is needed, and it even supports cross-file Tab hints.
Cursor automatically detects imports that need to be added and suggests them via Tab.

Summary

If I had to sum it up in one sentence: the first impression of a product must not be bad — it’s like meeting a person, first encounters matter. Trae’s paid model is inevitable, but after charging, it still falls short in many ways compared to the competition. That really shouldn’t happen. After all, Cursor’s company surely doesn’t have as many talented people as ByteDance, right?

I think Cursor feels like a product built by a team that deeply understands code development — they know what developers care about most. Trae, on the other hand, feels like a product led by a product team — it’s beautiful, has good interactive experience, but those are just nice-to-haves. The core is whether programmers can comfortably use it to solve problems and boost efficiency.

Of course, maybe I’ve been using Cursor for so long that I’m wearing tinted glasses when looking at Trae. Regardless, I hope Trae can become a product that people love as much as Cursor.

Written on the evening of May 30. Tomorrow is Dragon Boat Festival — Happy Dragon Boat Festival!