Continue AI Coding Assistant Review 2026

Open-source AI coding extension for VS Code and JetBrains — bring any model, configure custom rules, share assistants across your team.

Continue is the leading open-source alternative to GitHub Copilot and Cursor for engineers who want full control over the model, the prompt and the data their AI coding tool sees. It installs as a VS Code or JetBrains extension and exposes the familiar trio of autocomplete, chat and agent — but every layer is configurable via a YAML config and a marketplace of community-built 'assistants'. Want Continue to use a local Llama via Ollama for autocomplete, Anthropic's Claude for chat, and an internal proxy for agent calls so logs never leave the network? Three lines of config. Want to share a curated assistant configuration across the team with custom system prompts, rules, slash commands and indexed docs? Push it to the Continue Hub and let everyone install with one click. Continue also supports MCP servers natively — drop MCP server configs into your assistant and the agent can use those tools alongside Continue's built-in ones. The product is free and open source, with Continue Hub adding team management, analytics and shared assistants on a per-seat plan. Continue is the default choice for enterprises that need an on-prem coding assistant or for engineers who want to swap models without switching tools.