New CodeBuddy IDE Tested: Tencent’s Ambition to Empower Creatives Revealed}

Tencent has quietly made a major move.
Machine Heart and other media attended a small-scale launch event in Beijing, revealing Tencent’s determination and foresight in AI-assisted programming.

The key highlight was: Tencent’s latest AI IDE, CodeBuddy, officially enters beta testing!

Of course, this isn’t CodeBuddy’s first appearance. It has already been a mature AI coding plugin within Tencent. Tencent states that CodeBuddy has long been deployed internally, providing over 90% of staff with a "rocket pack" for coding efficiency, with 43% of Tencent’s code now AI-generated.

Now, they have evolved CodeBuddy into the first integrated development workspace that covers the entire process from product design to deployment, achieving full AI automation of the development cycle.

Industry Insights

Beyond the product, Machine Heart also focused on Tencent Cloud’s industry insights. The launch event discussed a concept Tencent calls multi-agent collaboration driving full-chain intelligent software engineering.

This sounds complex, but a few core ideas are worth sharing. First is the evolution paradigm of AI agents. Tencent divides AI agent development into five levels, similar to autonomous driving levels.

Currently, Tencent’s AI agents are roughly at level 3—project-level automation. Tools like Windsurf and Claude Code can handle the entire project cycle—requirements, coding, deployment—with some human intervention. Future goals aim for Level 4, where non-technical users can create complete products automatically, and Level 5, where multiple AI agents form a collaborative development team. Tencent plans to achieve Level 5 by 2027.

Latest release, CodeBuddy, marks a solid step toward Level 4 collaboration.

Product Overview

The product is a full-stack AI engineer that integrates IDE functionalities with multiple AI agents, enabling users to handle the entire product lifecycle—from idea to release—independently.

IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, a tool designed to help developers write, debug, and manage code efficiently. CodeBuddy combines IDE features with AI agents to create a comprehensive AI coding environment.

With CodeBuddy, a single person can act as product manager, designer, and front-end/back-end engineer, covering the full development cycle.

Evaluation & Experience

Our team quickly tested it and tried some small projects with CodeBuddy.

Opening the program reveals a UI very different from traditional IDEs. AI interaction dominates the interface, marking a significant shift from plugin-based tools.

We were impressed by the detailed UI design. Tencent says the team includes product managers who transitioned from designers, with high standards for interaction and aesthetics. Some developers come from QQ, with deep understanding of software interaction design.

We hope the cute CodeBuddy robot can move someday!

The UI minimizes traditional coding pages, command lines, and file management, showing a user-friendly design aimed at non-professionals.

Our internal test version supports models like Claude, GPT, Gemini, and others. The domestic version will support DeepSeek and the hybrid model.

To entertain ourselves, we tried to build a traditional tool:

"Create an HTML program that randomly generates the 64 hexagrams, allows user input, outputs the hexagram result, and provides model-based divination explanations."

We switched to planning and design modes, selected Claude-4.0-Sonnet, and let CodeBuddy handle the rest. It first generated a PRD and design document, which, while not perfect as formal requirements, had complete format and content, giving us a clear understanding of its planned actions.

After confirming the requirements, it wrote a to-do list and started executing.

CodeBuddy has full command line, coding, and preview capabilities, connected to cloud deployment via Supabase, making it powerful and efficient.

Within five minutes, a prototype appeared. When we asked for a change—adding a hexagram feature—it responded quickly. After two minutes, the feature was complete, with no obvious flaws in understanding or design. It even added a humorous disclaimer: "For entertainment only."

Its speed, completeness, and UI design are surprisingly impressive.

We also tested a login interface with a beautiful frosted-glass effect, which was perfectly rendered.

Although these are simple HTML demos, CodeBuddy’s usability as a creative partner is unquestionable.

Interested readers can apply for a trial.

Many users will likely want Figma-to-code features. Here’s an official demo video:

Ambition

Product delivery is the ultimate goal of creativity, and CodeBuddy helps ordinary users realize basic needs.

After testing, we feel this tool is a leap forward for Tencent’s AI programming efforts. It aims to inspire non-professionals’ creativity and bridge the gap from design to implementation.

If combined with Tencent’s existing development platform and widely adopted by creators, it could trigger a new wave of creative software development. Let’s wait and see.