Continue.dev and the open-source AI editor extension experiment

Continue.dev is the most credible open-source attempt at building Cursor as a VS Code extension. The pitch: don’t fork the editor, just plug a high-quality AI assistant into the editor you already use, with full bring-your-own-model support and open-source transparency.

After three months running Continue.dev as my primary AI assistant inside vanilla VS Code (specifically to evaluate whether OSS could replace Cursor), the answer is: not yet, but it’s closer than most people think — and the trade-offs are different from what the marketing implies.

What Continue is

A VS Code extension (also available for JetBrains) that adds:

• A chat sidebar that talks to whichever LLM you configure
• Inline edit commands triggered from a keyboard shortcut
• Codebase indexing (with embedding-based retrieval)
• An autocomplete-style tab feature (using your configured model)
• A growing library of “slash commands” and “context providers” — the OSS analogue to MCP

It is genuinely OSS — Apache 2.0 license, code on GitHub, anyone can contribute. The team behind it is a real company, but the project is run as an open community.

Why this even matters

If you have followed the AI IDE space, you know the trade-off: Cursor / Windsurf are forks of VS Code. They are great but they are forks — meaning you lose the rolling stream of Microsoft VS Code updates (the fork has to catch up), some VS Code extensions don’t work the same way, and your editor is now a dependency on a commercial closed-source product.

Continue.dev is the bet that you can get most of what Cursor offers without the fork. Keep your VS Code (or JetBrains) installation, install an extension, configure your API key, work normally.

Where it actually delivers

Bring-your-own-model is best in class

You point Continue at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, any Anthropic key, any local Ollama instance, any OpenRouter setup. The config is plain JSON. Switching models is a config-file change.

If you care about model flexibility — and especially if you want to route between expensive Anthropic for hard tasks and cheap DeepSeek for routine work — Continue is the cleanest implementation I have used.

Stays out of your way

The Continue UI is restrained. It does not redesign VS Code. It does not pop up suggestions you didn’t ask for. It is an extension that respects the editor it lives in. After Cursor, this can feel quiet at first, then refreshing.

True open source means you can audit

You can read the prompts Continue uses. You can see what data leaves your machine. You can fork it if the maintainers go in a direction you don’t like. For some engineers — especially in regulated industries or privacy-conscious individuals — this is the deciding feature.

Where it’s behind Cursor

The honest gap, in May 2025:

Tab completion quality. Continue’s autocomplete works but it does not feel like Cursor’s. Less anticipatory, fewer multi-line suggestions, slower in subjective latency. This is the biggest gap and the one most engineers will notice first.

Polish. The Cursor team has invested two years in tiny ergonomic improvements — the diff overlay, the keyboard flow, the way the chat sidebar interacts with the editor cursor. Continue does the same things, but each interaction is slightly more clunky.

Composer / multi-file edit. Continue can do multi-file edits via its agent mode, but the experience is rougher and the success rate noticeably lower than Cursor Composer.

Onboarding. Cursor is “install, sign in, type.” Continue is “install, decide on a model, configure an API key, read about context providers.” The activation energy is higher.

Where it actually beats Cursor

Three places, narrower but real:

No vendor lock-in. If Continue.dev raises prices or pivots, you keep your config and switch. With Cursor, you’re tied to whatever pricing model they land on.

Air-gapped / fully local workflows. You can run Continue with Ollama serving Qwen Coder or DeepSeek-Coder-V2 locally and never send code to a cloud LLM. Cursor can do this too via BYOK but the integration is rougher.

JetBrains users. Continue’s JetBrains plugin is actually serviceable. Cursor’s JetBrains story doesn’t exist (Cursor is a VS Code fork). If you’re a JetBrains shop, Continue is your only real first-class option.

What the community is saying

The r/ChatGPTCoding community in 2025 treats Continue as a known-good “second-tier” option:

• The AI stack as engineering layer thread mentions Continue as part of the increasingly fragmented OSS toolchain — competent but requiring more assembly
• The vibe-coding guide lists Continue as a credible alternative for users who don’t want to fork their editor

The pattern: heavy users have tried Continue, respect it, but mostly haven’t switched away from Cursor for daily work. The community calculus is “Continue is fine, Cursor is better for most things, the gap is closing slowly.”

The interesting wedge case: engineers who got annoyed by Cursor’s 2025 pricing changes and tried Continue as a cheaper alternative. Most of them came back to Cursor for the polish, a few stayed for the principle.

When to actually use Continue

Reach for Continue if:

• You are in JetBrains and want a real AI assistant
• You care about being able to audit / fork your AI tooling
• You want zero vendor lock-in on the editor itself
• You run local LLMs (Ollama, LM Studio) and want first-class support
• You are building a team policy that requires OSS dependencies

Stick with Cursor if:

• You value tab completion quality most
• You want the smallest activation energy
• You want the largest community and the most existing patterns to copy

The bigger pattern

Continue.dev’s existence is good for the ecosystem regardless of whether you personally switch. It puts pressure on Cursor’s pricing. It keeps Cursor honest about lock-in. And as a hedge — a tool to have ready if Cursor stops being the right choice — it’s the strongest OSS option in the space.

For us, Continue lives on my second machine as exactly that: a working alternative I keep configured. Cursor is the daily driver because the autocomplete still wins, but I check in on Continue every couple of months and the gap is genuinely shrinking. That’s the headline. The OSS alternative is real, viable, and a meaningful presence in the AI coding tool landscape in 2025.

See our Cursor vs Copilot piece for the broader IDE-extension comparison.