Continue is an open-source AI coding assistant — available as a VS Code extension, a JetBrains plugin, and a command-line tool — that was built to be model-agnostic, letting developers plug in almost any large language model (local models via Ollama, or cloud models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and others) for autocomplete, chat, and agentic coding tasks. Continue Dev, Inc. released the project under an Apache 2.0 license starting in 2023, and the codebase grew to roughly 34,800 GitHub stars and 5,000 forks before development effectively stopped.
Current status: acquired and discontinued
As of mid-2026, Continue is no longer an actively developed, independent product. Continue's own homepage now states plainly: 'Continue has been acquired by Cursor.' According to reporting on the deal, Cursor (legal name Anysphere) quietly acqui-hired the Continue team around June 16, 2026, and the companies did not disclose financial terms. Continue shipped a final v2.0.0 release of its VS Code extension, CLI, and JetBrains plugin — removing anonymous telemetry and authentication code, and fixing bugs — around June 19, 2026, and the GitHub repository (continuedev/continue) is now marked no longer actively maintained and read-only for all users. Notably, the same week Cursor announced the Continue acquisition, SpaceX announced it would acquire Cursor itself for $60 billion in an all-stock deal placing it under xAI, a deal expected to close in Q3 2026 — meaning Continue's code now sits several acquisitions deep inside a very different kind of company than the one that built it.
What it did / what remains usable
Before the acquisition, Continue's core features were tab-autocomplete using fill-in-the-middle (FIM) models, an in-editor chat interface, code editing that preserves formatting and style, and an agent mode capable of autonomous multi-step tasks with tool use. Configuration happened through a config.yaml (or config.json) file that let teams define separate models for chat, edit, apply, embed, and rerank roles, and Continue could run entirely offline against locally hosted models for teams that wanted no code leaving their network. Because the code remains published under Apache 2.0 and the repository, while read-only, is still publicly accessible, existing forks, pinned builds, and self-hosted deployments of Continue can, in principle, keep running — there is simply no ongoing development, support, or roadmap from the original team.
Who it's for now
Given the acquisition and discontinuation, Continue is best understood today as a snapshot of an open-source, model-agnostic coding-assistant architecture rather than an actively maintained product to adopt going forward. Teams that already depend on it may continue running it via self-hosted or forked builds, but anyone newly comparing coding assistants should treat Continue as a historical/legacy option and look at Cursor (its acquirer) or other actively maintained alternatives for new projects.