Getting Started with Coze: A Complete Guide to Building AI Agents from Scratch

What is Coze?

Coze is a one-stop AI application development platform launched by ByteDance. As a product from the parent company of TikTok (and its Chinese counterpart Douyin), Coze has a clear core objective — lowering the barrier to AI application development, enabling ordinary people without programming backgrounds to quickly build their own AI agents.

The AI Agent mentioned here is one of the hottest concepts in the artificial intelligence field today. Unlike traditional chatbots, AI agents possess the ability to autonomously perceive their environment, formulate plans, invoke tools, and execute tasks. They're not just passively responding in a "you ask, I answer" fashion — they can autonomously break down task steps based on user goals, call upon external tools like search engines, databases, and APIs, and progressively complete complex tasks. Since 2024, tech giants like OpenAI, Google, and ByteDance have all identified AI Agents as the core direction for large model deployment, and the industry widely believes AI Agents will become the next technological wave following large language models.

Unlike traditional AI development approaches, Coze adopts a visual drag-and-drop development model. You don't need to write a single line of code — just perform simple drag-and-drop and configuration operations on the platform to develop fully functional AI applications. Even when certain steps do require code, Coze supports automatic code generation through natural language (i.e., plain Chinese or English), truly achieving "zero-code" development.

Visual drag-and-drop development wasn't invented by Coze — it originated from the Low-Code/No-Code development movement. This concept can be traced back to enterprise application development platforms of the 2010s (such as Mendix and OutSystems), with the core idea of replacing hand-written code with graphical interfaces, allowing business personnel to participate in application development. In the AI field, visual drag-and-drop typically manifests as workflow orchestration — users drag different functional modules (such as LLM calls, conditional logic, and data processing) onto a canvas as nodes and define execution order through connections, thereby constructing complete AI processing pipelines. Coze builds upon this by introducing natural language code generation capabilities, lowering the development barrier to unprecedented levels.

Here's a practical example: if you're a travel consultant, creating a travel itinerary for a client might previously take anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours. But with an AI agent built on Coze, you just need to input basic information like the client's destination and number of days, and a complete itinerary plan can be generated in 10 seconds. This is the efficiency revolution that Coze delivers.

Three Core Advantages of Coze

Coze stands out among numerous AI development platforms primarily due to these three core advantages:

1. Extremely Low Development Barrier

Coze's most signature feature is its visual drag-and-drop and natural language development paradigm. Natural language development means you tell the platform what functionality you want using everyday conversational language, and Coze automatically writes the code for you. This enables users with absolutely no programming background to quickly build AI applications with extremely high development efficiency.

2. Powerful Ecosystem and Integration Capabilities

Coze integrates a rich plugin system that can easily connect to external APIs. For example, if you want to incorporate Feishu's collaboration features or Amap's navigation capabilities into your AI agent, you can quickly achieve this through plugins. The platform also supports multiple mainstream large language models and provides convenient knowledge base (RAG) functionality, allowing your agent to answer questions based on specific knowledge.

RAG technology deserves a deeper explanation here. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is a key technology for addressing the "hallucination" problem and knowledge timeliness issues in large language models. LLMs derive their knowledge from training data, which has knowledge cutoff date limitations, and they tend to "fabricate" answers when addressing specialized domain questions. RAG works as follows: when a user asks a question, the system first retrieves the most relevant document fragments from an external knowledge base, then passes these fragments as context to the large model, allowing it to generate answers based on actual materials. This ensures both answer accuracy and enables AI to leverage private data such as internal company documents and product manuals. Coze's built-in knowledge base feature is implemented based on RAG technology — users simply upload documents, and the platform automatically handles complex technical processes like text chunking, vector storage, and retrieval matching.

3. Enterprise-Grade Solutions

Coze supports team collaboration, permission management, and version control, providing full-pipeline services from development, testing, to deployment and monitoring. However, it's important to objectively note that Coze still has certain limitations for enterprise-level large-scale AI projects — it excels more at rapidly developing small-scale AI projects.

Domestic vs. International Version: Which Should You Choose?

Coze actually has two versions, which many beginners don't know about:

Comparison	Domestic Version (coze.cn)	International Version (coze.com)
Language Interface	Chinese	English
Access Method	Direct access	Requires VPN
Available Models	Doubao, DeepSeekAd, Kimi, StepFun	GPT-4o, GPT-5, Gemini, DeepSeek
Capability Ceiling	Strong	Stronger

These models each have distinctive features worth briefly understanding: Doubao is ByteDance's self-developed large model, excelling in Chinese comprehension and generation; DeepSeek, developed by DeepSeek AI, is known for its high cost-effectiveness and powerful reasoning capabilities, with its open-source model DeepSeek-V3 performing impressively across multiple benchmarks; Kimi, launched by Moonshot AI, features ultra-long context windows (supporting 2 million character input) as its core selling point; StepFun focuses on multimodal capabilities. On the international version, GPT-4o is OpenAI's flagship multimodal model, GPT-5 is their latest-generation model, and Gemini is Google DeepMind's multimodal large model. Different models have varying strengths across dimensions like reasoning ability, creative writing, code generation, and multilingual support — Coze's multi-model switching design allows users to select the most suitable model for specific tasks.

From a model capability perspective, the international version produces more powerful AI agents overall since it can utilize GPT-5, GPT-4o, and other currently top-performing large models. However, the domestic version's advantage lies in convenient access and a Chinese-friendly interface, making it lower-cost for domestic users to learn and use.

Recommendation: If you're a domestic user or beginner, start learning with the domestic version; if you work at a foreign company or have overseas usage needs, consider the international version for stronger model support.

What Can Coze Do? The Difference Between Agents and Apps

Coze currently supports creating two types of AI products:

Agents (Bots)

Agents are Coze's most core product form — they are conversation-based AI projects. Users interact with AI through a chat interface, and the AI automatically invokes plugins or workflows to execute tasks and generate responses.

A small detail worth noting: on the Coze platform, AI Agents have a specific name — Bot. While the terminology differs, Bots are essentially AI Agents — it's just Coze's platform-specific designation.

Agents are suitable for scenarios including:

• Customer service Q&A automation
• Content creation assistance
• Information retrieval and organization
• Process-driven task execution

Apps

Coze now also supports creating small AI applications, which is a relatively new feature (currently still in Beta). Unlike agents, apps have complete frontend interfaces and backend logic — users don't need to interact through conversation but can operate directly through visual interfaces.

For example, a translation app: users simply enter content in an input field, click a "Translate" button, and the backend calls the large model to complete the translation and directly output the result — no conversation process needed.

Simple summary: If you need a conversation-based tool, choose an agent; if you need a small tool with clear input/output interfaces, choose an app.

Who Should Learn Coze?

Coze isn't just a tool for programmers — in fact, it's better suited for the following groups:

• Working professionals: Automate repetitive tasks with AI, such as report generation, data organization, and customer responses
• Content creators: Build AI assistants for content creation, topic analysis, and more
• Small business owners: Quickly build customer service bots, marketing tools, etc.
• AI enthusiasts: Explore various possibilities of AI applications with zero barrier to entry

For programmers, Coze actually has relatively limited use cases — because programmers typically develop large-scale AI applications, while Coze excels at rapidly building small, lightweight AI tools.

Summary

Coze, as ByteDance's AI application development platform, is toolifying and democratizing professional AI capabilities.

AI Democratization is an important trend in the tech industry in recent years, referring to opening up AI capabilities — originally accessible only to large tech companies and professional developers — to ordinary users through platformization and toolification. This trend is driven by multiple factors: the commercialization of LLM APIs has reduced AI calling costs, the maturation of cloud computing infrastructure has eliminated computational barriers, and zero-code development platforms like Coze have further removed the programming skills barrier. According to Gartner's predictions, by 2026, 80% of enterprise applications will be built by non-professional developers (i.e., "citizen developers"). Coze is a representative product of this wave in the AI application domain.

It gives everyone the opportunity to leverage the power of large models to improve work efficiency without any programming foundation. Whether you want to explore the possibilities of AI or genuinely hope to solve real problems with AI, Coze is a worthwhile starting point.

Key Takeaways

• Coze is a one-stop AI application development platform by ByteDance that enables zero-code AI agent development through visual drag-and-drop
• Coze has a domestic version (coze.cn) and an international version (coze.com); the international version supports stronger models like GPT-5 but requires VPN access
• The platform supports two product types: conversation-based agents (Bots) and AI apps with complete interfaces
• Coze's three core advantages: extremely low development barrier, powerful ecosystem integration, and enterprise-grade solutions — particularly excelling at rapid small-scale AI project development
• Coze is suitable for everyone, not limited to programmers, and serves as an important tool for AI democratization