Alibaba’s QwenLM team released Qwen Code in June 2025 as an open-source terminal coding agent built atop Google’s Gemini CLI codebase (Apache 2.0 licensed) and optimised for the Qwen3-Coder model family. The release came weeks after Google open-sourced Gemini CLI, and Qwen Code quickly amassed 25,000 GitHub stars — signalling strong developer interest in model-specific CLI agents with free access tiers.
Qwen Code supported all major LLM providers while offering optimised performance with Alibaba’s Qwen models, which provided a free tier for developers internationally. Integration with VS Code and Zed expanded its reach beyond pure terminal workflows, and MCP compatibility allowed connection to the broader ecosystem of tool servers.
The release marked a significant moment in the globalisation of agentic coding tools: a major Chinese AI lab producing a competitive open-source coding agent within weeks of a Google release, with comparable capabilities. It demonstrated that the race for agentic developer tooling had become genuinely global by mid-2025.