What is Continue?
Continue is a free, open-source AI assistant for software developers. It helps developers be more productive by providing AI-enabled autocomplete and chat-based code support drops in popular editors. Developers can work with multiple LLMs (large language models) so that they have choices on the level of their programming context.
Key Features of Continue
- Editor Integrations – This works with JetBrains IDEs and VS Code.
- AI Autocomplete – AI Autocomplete offers contextual suggestions that suit the context of your code nicely.
- In-context chat – You can ask questions and get answers to your editor in context.
- Model flexibility – You can scope your models from GPT to Code Llama.
- Local/remote – You can use local models or cloud-based APIs.
- Custom prompts – You can customize the prompts so that they behave how you want.
- Open-source – The community has contributed to the plugin, and it is customizable for your project.
Pros & Cons of Continue
Pros:
- It is available for free in a public service way, so it is available to everyone.
- With it being so fast, normally faster than you typing it yourself, and typically more accurate.
- It can process many language frameworks.
- It can run and can function, anchored to a rich coding editor.
- You can save your prompts and workflows for this specific usage.
Cons:
- There may be some setup, and someone should have at least a low level of technical skills to have a reasonable chance of making it work.
- The performance will be qualified by the performance of the model you are going to use.
- You may not have the computing power to run a model locally in a successful way.
- There are other issues with VS Code and JetBrains.
- It’s not for everybody, and not for a developer to know no code other than code.
Who Can Use Continue?
- Programmers want AI to work on code completion and debugging.
- Project teams want AI to speed up code reviews and velocity.
- Open-source contributors want AI to be flexible and customizable.
- Academics and students want AI to help them learn programming languages.
Pricing & Plans
Continue is purely open source and free. Users will have the option to continue using free (or paid) APIs for their models (e.g., OpenAI) or local models of their choice based on their configuration. There will be no usage fees on Continue, so users can spin up projects without having spent a penny and have the freedom to continue working productively without the additional stress.
Conclusion
Continue is an AI tool intended for developers, and it can be used in the coding environments that developers use (e.g., VS Code, JetBrains). With real-time support for many models, the suggestions become part of the workflow. In addition to this, continue has an awesome open-source community as well. Overall, continue can enhance the workflows and productivity of any developer who chooses to take advantage of it.
