Launch HN: Continue (YC S23) – Create custom AI code assistants

I think that is a temporary problem. General purpose agents will get better in general with libraries without having to have specialized agents.

Right now they are defined as a command (typically npx, uvx, docker or another way of running code) and run as a subprocess in VS Code, which is the same starting point that tools like Claude Desktop have used. We're also going to support SSE-based servers though, which will make it possible to hook Continue up to an MCP that runs anywhere.

I certainly feel that running them locally isn't the end state, curious if others have started to feel pains there yet?

We think about this a lot, and I think there are merits to the viewpoint. If I were to write a rule that said "make sure all code you write uses best practices", it should already be obvious enough to a good language model that this is always the case. It's "common knowledge". In some cases today there might be "common knowledge" that is a bit more rare, and the language model doesn't quite know this. I might agree that this could be obviated as well.

A situation to think about: if I were to write a rule that said "I am using Tailwind CSS for styling", then this is actually information that can't be just known. It's not "common knowledge", but instead "preference" or "personal knowledge". I do think it's a fair response to say "can't it just read my package.json"? Probably this works in a handful of cases, but I've come to find that even so there are a few benefits to custom rules that I expect to hold true regardless of LLM progress: - It's more efficient to read a rule than to call a tool to read package.json on every request - Especially in large enterprise codebases, the majority of knowledge is highly implicit (oftentimes in detrimental ways, but so the world works)

But yeah this is a majorly important and interesting question in my mind. What types of customization will last, and which won't? A blog post would be amazing

> As someone who has done a lot of work with agentic coding

Can you please share what are your favourite tools and for what exactly? Would be helpful

I've been using Cline a lot with the PLAN + ACT modes and Cursor for the Inline Edits but I've noticed that for anything much larger than Claude 3.7's context window things get less reliable and it's not worth it anymore.

Have you found a way to share knowledge packs? Any conventions? How do you manage chat histories / old tasks and do you create documentation from it for future work?

Having used the agentic Github Copilot in VSCode Insiders, it is hard to understand why this is necessary given how well that functions.