Qwen Code

Qwen Code is an AI coding agent from the Qwen team at Alibaba. It reads your codebase, edits files, runs commands and creates commits. It has sub-agents, skills, memory, hooks, MCP, a plan mode and a headless mode for scripts and CI.

It runs as a command-line tool on Linux, macOS and Windows. There is also a desktop app, a local web UI (experimental), plugins for VS Code, Zed and JetBrains, a Chrome extension, SDKs and chat links for Telegram, DingTalk, WeChat and Feishu. It works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Qwen APIs, and with local models through Ollama or vLLM.

The code is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence. You pay only for the model you connect. The free tier with a Qwen account ended on 2026-04-15. Alibaba Cloud Model Studio offers Coding Plan Pro at $50 per month (up to 6,000 requests per 5 hours, 45,000 per week, 90,000 per month; limited slots), a usage-based Token Plan, or a standard API key.

It began as a fork of Google Gemini CLI 0.8.2.

Made for

Developers who want an AI agent that works where they already work: in the terminal, the editor, a desktop app or chat. Also teams that run it in scripts and CI, or build on it with the SDKs.

Use cases

• Build features from a plain-language description
• Debug and fix issues from an error message
• Ask questions about a codebase
• Fix lint issues and resolve merge conflicts
• Run tasks in CI with headless mode
• Connect tools like Jira or Google Drive through MCP

An alternative to

• Gemini CLI

  Works with any model you connect, including local ones through Ollama or vLLM.

• Claude Code

  Open source (Apache 2.0), and runs with local models at no cost.