Continue is an open-source AI code assistant and agent framework originally developed by the Continue team (continuedev) and recently acquired by Cursor. It was designed to provide developers with modular, transparent AI capabilities directly within their development environments and workflows, emphasizing a developer-in-the-loop paradigm over opaque full automation. In standard workflows, Continue operates via editor extensions and underlying CLI/agent utilities that allow developers to connect any LLM—including OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, or self-hosted models via Ollama and LM Studio. It provides context indexing, inline edits, chat-based refactoring, and customizable slash commands to orchestrate repository-aware generation and debugging tasks using user-supplied API keys or local weights. What historically distinguished Continue from proprietary alternatives is its completely open-source architecture and flexibility. Developers have granular control over prompt templates, custom context providers, and model selection for autocomplete versus chat, preventing vendor lock-in and keeping telemetry and code indexing transparent. Following its acquisition by Cursor, the core Continue repository remains publicly accessible under open-source licensing. Developers can continue to run, fork, and self-host the codebase for individual or enterprise setups without mandatory subscription fees.
Tags: cli, code assistant, codebase, coding agent, developer tools, OpenSource