# Continue

18 Hacker News commenters recommended Continue and 12 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Open-source AI coding assistant people recommend for its configurable checks, autocomplete, and local model support with Ollama. Common caveat: many reports of buggy plugin behavior in VS Code and JetBrains.

## Why people recommend it

- Configurable, focused checks product (3 comments): "Continue is very focused on the use case of checks and gets a lot of the small details right" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47054080)) "our checks product is powered by an open-source CLI (we think this is important)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050676)) "the configurable part turns out to be the main bit" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050858))
- Works in VS Code and VSCodium (4 comments): "Continue on vscode with Ollama running (start it with "ollama serve") is great." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48344390)) "The Continue plugin for VSCode gets all of this accomplished." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48344265)) "help you code on vscodium with Continue. Pretty nice!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015452))
- Works with local models like Ollama (2 comments): "Continue on vscode with Ollama running (start it with "ollama serve") is great." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48344390)) "It’s the only one that handles air-gapped setups properly." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706731))
- Good autocomplete (2 comments): "I've also made decent experiences with continue, at least for autocomplete." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46892425)) "best open source autocomplete in our view" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028974))

## What people warn about

- Buggy, janky plugin behavior (6 comments): "most of the plugins that try to do that are pretty buggy or broken (e.g. Continue.dev)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401628)) "i tried the continue vscode extension, and it seemed kind of janky" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927158)) "the whole plugin was a buggy mess and it didn't work well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46506209))
- Frustrating experience in JetBrains and VS Code (2 comments): "that experience was a mess both in JetBrains IDEs, as well as Visual Studio Code" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716519)) "a lot of frustration with the Continue plugin in my IDE" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667192))
- Ignores instructions and burns tokens (2 comments): "even tho I told it no changes without my explicit go ahead, it ignored me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361595)) "8M token burned in 30 minutes. App does not work." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48619099))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [GitHub Copilot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/github-copilot.md): 571 recommend
- [oh-my-pi](https://hackerapproved.com/p/oh-my-pi.md): 104 recommend
- [Grok Build CLI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grok-build.md): 66 recommend
- [DeepSeek Harness](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-harness.md): 63 recommend
- [Claude Code VS Code extension](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-code-vs-code-extension.md): 31 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Continue", https://hackerapproved.com/p/continue/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).