Continue: Open-Source AI Code Assistant

Overview

Continue is an open-source AI code assistant that runs as an extension in VS Code and JetBrains IDEs. It has 2.5 million VS Code Marketplace installs and 32,400 GitHub stars as of May 2026. The extension is free; you bring your own model (any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, Anthropic, Gemini, Bedrock, Ollama, or self-hosted).

Pricing

Tier	Price	What it is
OSS Extension	Free	Full extension, bring your own model
Hub	~$10/month	Shared configs, team model management

No markup on model usage. You pay your model provider directly.

Core modes

Continue ships four interaction modes:

Autocomplete: Inline completions as you type, using any configured model
Chat: Sidebar chat with full codebase context
Edit: Select code, describe a change, apply it
Agent: Multi-step autonomous task execution (reads files, runs commands, iterates)

Agent mode is the newest addition and positions Continue directly against Cline and Claude Code for autonomous coding workflows inside VS Code.

Any provider, any model

Continue connects to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Ollama, Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, and xAI through a unified configuration. The same extension covers local development (via Ollama for zero-cost completions) and production-grade models (Anthropic API for complex tasks). Switching models is a config change, not a subscription change.

Model Context Protocol support means Continue can connect to MCP servers for external context and tool access.

Where it fits

Continue is the open-source, vendor-neutral alternative to Cursor for VS Code users who don't want to switch IDEs and don't want a paid subscription. Compared to Cline: Continue is more assistant-oriented (it suggests, you apply), Cline is more agent-oriented (it acts). Compared to Claude Code: Continue is IDE-native, Claude Code is terminal-native.

The Hub tier is new (2026) and targets teams that want to standardize model config and context rules across developers without each person maintaining their own config files.

Field notes

Continue VS Code Marketplace page shows 2.5M installs as of May 2026, making it the most-installed AI coding extension on the marketplace that is not bundled with a paid IDE. [community-thread, 2026-05-01]