GitHub Copilot proved that in-editor AI is worth having, but it's a closed box wired to one vendor's models. Continue is the open-source answer: a VS Code and JetBrains extension that gives you autocomplete, chat, and inline edits, but lets you choose the model behind each of those features - a hosted frontier model for chat, a fast local one for autocomplete, whatever fits. It's Apache-2.0, and your configuration lives in a file you own.
Bring Your Own Model
Continue separates the feature from the model. You can point tab-autocomplete at a small local model running in Ollama for speed and privacy, and route the chat sidebar to a stronger hosted model for harder questions. Nothing is hardcoded to a single provider.
# ~/.continue/config.yaml (excerpt)
models:
- name: Local Autocomplete
provider: ollama
model: qwen2.5-coder:1.5b
roles: [autocomplete]
- name: Chat
provider: anthropic
model: claude-sonnet-4
roles: [chat, edit]
More Than Autocomplete
The chat panel understands your codebase through context providers - you can @-mention a file, the whole repo, the terminal output, a git diff, or documentation you've indexed, and Continue feeds exactly that into the prompt. Inline edit lets you highlight code, describe a change, and review the diff before it applies.
Config You Can Commit
Because the setup is a plain config file, you can commit a project's Continue configuration alongside the code, so everyone on the team gets the same models, context providers, and custom prompts. It turns "how I use AI here" into something version-controlled rather than tribal knowledge.
Rough Edges and Limitations
- Autocomplete quality tracks the model. A tiny local model is fast but will suggest less useful completions than a larger one; there's a real speed-versus-quality dial to tune.
- Setup is more involved than Copilot. The flexibility costs you a config step. Sensible defaults exist, but the power is in customizing.
- You manage the keys. Bring-your-own-model means bring-your-own-API-keys and their costs.
- Indexing large repos takes time. The first codebase index on a big project isn't instant.
If you like the shape of Copilot but want to own the model choice, keep sensitive code local, and version-control how your team uses AI, Continue is the most mature open option.
Internal link suggestion: link "choose the model" to the Cody or Cline post for a comparison of in-editor AI approaches.
