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Continue deployment notes

Open-source coding assistant for VS Code and JetBrains with model flexibility.

Deployment verdict

Continue is a good candidate for teams that want an open-source coding assistant inside existing IDE workflows. It is less about autonomous project delivery and more about controllable assistance: chat, autocomplete, model routing, local model experiments, and developer-owned configuration.

Before installing

  • Review the license: Apache-2.0.
  • Check whether Docker is supported: no.
  • Check API key dependency: depends on model/provider.
  • Confirm supported models: OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, OpenRouter.

Recommended deployment path

  1. Install in one IDE and configure only one approved provider.
  2. Test explanation, edit, and autocomplete workflows separately.
  3. If using local models, compare latency and answer quality against a hosted model.
  4. Document the configuration before rolling it out to more developers.

Common evaluation traps

  • IDE convenience can hide model cost and data-policy questions.
  • Autocomplete quality varies heavily by model.
  • Team rollout needs consistent configuration, not every developer improvising providers.

Acceptance test tasks

  1. Ask it to explain one unfamiliar module.
  2. Ask for a small edit and review the diff manually.
  3. Compare local and hosted model answers on the same file context.

Setup commands

git clone https://github.com/continuedev/continue.gitRead README and copy the example environment fileStart with Docker if the project provides compose files