Continue

Continue is an open-source AI coding assistant that allows developers to connect any large language model (LLM) to their development environment. Unlike proprietary tools that lock you into a specific AI provider, Continue gives developers full flexibility to use any model — whether hosted by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral, or local models running on your own machine.

The project is built as a VS Code and JetBrains extension, bringing conversational AI capabilities directly into the IDE. Developers can chat with the AI about their code, ask questions, get explanations, and generate code — all within the familiar development environment.

Continue's architecture is fundamentally different from tools like Copilot or Cursor because it's designed to be a flexible framework rather than a fixed product. You bring your own API keys for services like Claude, GPT-4, Gemini, or configure it to run local models through Ollama or LM Studio. This means you have full control over costs, privacy, and model selection.

The context system in Continue is particularly powerful. It can read your entire codebase as context, understand file relationships, and pass relevant code snippets to the AI for more accurate assistance. You can explicitly reference specific files, folders, or code snippets in your conversations, giving the AI precise context about what you're working on.

Continue supports custom slash commands that let you define repeatable workflows. For example, you can create commands that automatically include certain context, apply specific prompting strategies, or trigger common tasks like writing tests, generating documentation, or creating commit messages.

For teams, Continue can be configured with shared configurations through a config.json file that can be committed to version control. This allows teams to standardize on the same AI models, prompting strategies, and context inclusion rules across the entire organization.

The tool is particularly popular among developers who want to use local, private models for code generation — running models like CodeLlama, Mistral, or WizardCoder locally means zero data leaves your machine, addressing the most stringent privacy requirements.

Continue's open-source nature means the community actively contributes improvements, and the configuration system is highly extensible for building custom AI-assisted development workflows.