Baidu Unveils Comate AI IDE Industry’s First Multimodal Multi-Agent Coding Platform

Beijing – Baidu has launched Comate AI IDE, the industry’s first multimodal, multi-agent collaborative AI Integrated Development Environment (IDE), marking a significant leap forward in AI-assisted programming. The announcement was made at Baidu’s AI Open Day, highlighting the company’s commitment to innovation in artificial intelligence.

Comate AI IDE boasts a groundbreaking feature: one-click design-to-code conversion. This allows developers to precisely transform Figma design drafts into highly usable code, potentially saving up to 80% of repetitive labor. The IDE is equipped with core capabilities including AI-assisted coding across the entire development process, multi-agent collaboration, and enhanced multimodal functionalities. It also supports the MCP (Meta-Configurable Programming) framework for seamless integration with external tools, adapting to a wide range of development scenarios.

According to Baidu, Comate AI IDE is designed to be an efficient, intelligent, secure, and reliable AI IDE for domestic enterprises and developers. Currently, code generated by Comate accounts for over 43% of Baidu’s daily new code volume.

Baidu Vice President Chen Yang emphasized the transformative potential of Comate AI IDE, stating, Sixty years ago, programmers wrote the first ‘Hello World’ using punched cards. Comate AI IDE allows this greeting to resonate in a new way: Hello World, Hello Life. While improving programming efficiency, it lowers the barrier to entry, helping everyone with a dream, including visually impaired developers and elementary school students, to build their world.

The launch of a self-developed AI-native development environment, rather than simply a plugin for existing platforms like VS Code and JetBrains, gives Baidu greater autonomy in the editor’s interface and underlying logic, restructuring the entire development workflow and even the developer ecosystem.

Comate AI IDE is designed to provide comprehensive connectivity in four key areas: intelligence, expansion, collaboration, and inspiration. It boasts several core capabilities, including AI-assisted coding throughout the entire process, multi-agent collaboration, enhanced multimodal capabilities, and support for MCP, positioning it as the workbench for engineers in the AI era.

Peng Yunpeng, Senior Manager of Baidu Comate, provided a detailed introduction to the platform. He demonstrated the multi-agent functionality using the Zulu programming agent within Comate AI IDE. Zulu possesses autonomous thinking and decision-making capabilities, supporting automatic task breakdown, independent decision-making on the next steps, and real-time display of the thought process. Developers can now accomplish complex tasks simply by speaking their requirements. Zulu has also been upgraded with enhanced specialization, behavioral capabilities, and combination modes.

Multimodal capabilities are another highlight of Comate AI IDE, particularly in front-end scenarios. Features such as design-to-code (F2C) and image-to-code further streamline the development process.

The unveiling of Comate AI IDE signals a significant advancement in AI-assisted coding, promising to boost developer productivity, lower the barrier to entry, and unlock new possibilities for innovation. As the AI coding market is projected to experience rapid growth, Baidu’s Comate AI IDE is poised to be a key player in shaping the future of software development.

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