
Some notes from the 2025 Volcano Engine Force Conference
ByteDance is pushing on many fronts at once. It takes every form factor to the extreme at the product level — not only in multimodal conversational assistants (consumer-facing), cloud native, FaaS and other areas, but it's already speeding down the highway on the entry-point and ecosystem side. What struck me most was Trae Solo. Sure, it's vaporware, so I'll hold off on it for now — but why would Trae, an app aimed at programmers, get so many sessions and so much airtime over two days? I think it's wildly ambitious. Trae Solo could someday become another kind of browser, or another kind of integrated office suite. I say it replaces the browser because it will become the entry point for getting all information. I say it becomes office software because it will become the tool for producing every digital output. For me, Trae can replace Doubao, replace Coze Space, replace Manus, replace Fellou, replace any agent. MCP gives it unmatched extensibility; being a VSCode environment means it inherently has the low-level ability to run all kinds of local tools; and writing and compiling code is the ultimate fallback for whatever the above can't do. It can produce code, produce documents, analyze data — it can be a work partner and an expert in any form.


