Continue

About Continue

Continue is an open-source AI coding assistant delivered as an extension for Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs. It allows developers to connect virtually any large language model to their development environment, including models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Mistral, as well as locally hosted models running through Ollama or similar tools. Because it is model-agnostic, teams are not locked into a single provider and can swap or combine models depending on the task at hand. The extension supports several core workflows that developers encounter daily. Users can chat with a model directly inside the IDE to ask questions about their codebase, get explanations of unfamiliar code, or work through bugs. Continue also supports inline code editing, where a developer highlights a section of code and issues a natural-language instruction to refactor, extend, or fix it. Tab autocomplete is available as well, providing real-time code suggestions as developers type. A context system lets users pull in specific files, documentation, terminal output, or web search results to give the model relevant information before generating a response, which meaningfully improves output quality on project-specific tasks. Continue is aimed primarily at individual developers and engineering teams who want fine-grained control over which models power their tooling, how their code is handled, and what data leaves their environment. The open-source nature of the project makes it attractive to organizations with strict data privacy requirements, since local model support means code never has to be sent to an external API. The extension itself is free to use and available on GitHub under an open-source license. Costs depend entirely on the models a user chooses to connect, meaning someone running a local model pays nothing beyond compute, while someone connecting to a commercial API pays that provider's standard rates. There is no proprietary subscription attached to Continue itself.

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