Continue Review 2026: The Open-Source AI Extension You Fully Control

What Is Continue?

Continue is an open-source AI coding extension for VS Code and JetBrains IDEs, licensed under Apache 2.0. It provides code completions, chat, inline editing, and agentic capabilities, but unlike proprietary tools, it lets you connect any LLM backend — commercial APIs, open-weight models, or fully local models running on your own hardware via Ollama or LM Studio.

What Sets It Apart

Continue’s defining feature is model flexibility paired with full transparency. You choose every model in your AI pipeline — a fast model for completions, a capable model for agentic tasks, a local model for sensitive code. No other mainstream extension offers this level of configurability. For organizations with strict compliance requirements or air-gapped environments, the ability to self-host everything and keep code entirely on-premises is often a hard requirement.

The trade-off for this flexibility is setup complexity. Unlike Copilot or Cursor where you sign in and start coding, Continue requires you to choose a model provider, obtain API keys, and edit a configuration file. There is no built-in default model — you must configure one before Continue does anything useful.

Multi-IDE support is a practical advantage for mixed-editor teams. Continue works identically in both VS Code and JetBrains, so teams with different editor preferences can standardize on a single AI tool and share configuration across the organization.

Who It’s For

• Developers who want full control over their AI coding stack and model choices
• Organizations that require self-hosted or fully local AI tooling for compliance
• Mixed-editor teams using both VS Code and JetBrains
• Developers who want to experiment with different models and configurations
• Those who prefer not to manage model configuration may find Copilot or Cursor easier to start with

Sources

• Continue
• Continue Documentation
• Continue GitHub Repository