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

hub.continue.dev

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

#31

Post by sestinj »

thelastbender12 wrote: post #22

Congrats on the release! I've been using Cursor but somewhat annoyed with the regular IDE affordances not working quite right (absence of pylance), and would love to go back to VSCode. I'd love it if you lean into pooled model usage, rather than it being an addon. IMO it is the biggest win for Cursor usage - a reasonable num of LLM calls per month, so I never have to do token math or fiddle with api keys. Of course,…

Excited to hear how it goes for you!

Our Models Add-On is intended to give the same flat monthly fee as you’re accustomed to with other products. What did you mean by leaning into pooled, just making it more front-and-center?

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

#32

Post by talos_ »

paradite wrote: post #23

I think this is an interesting pivot, but Cursor's project level rules and custom modes will probably quickly evolve to cover all the aspects listed on your hub. (Maybe it already does) This also allows developers to switch between projects quickly while simultaneously also switching the setup for the AI agent.

My main gripe with Cursor is that they put MCP usage behind a paywall and their support for the protocol is weaker than Continue's in meaningful ways[1]. Given the big community push on MCP development, I'm a bit annoyed that Cursor monetizes OSS work with a paywall...

[1]https://modelcontextprotocol.io/clients

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

#33

Post by talos_ »

betimsl wrote: post #25

Why separate? It's not like there's limited capacity...you can have an assistant knowing all the languages at once.

I guess you would be paying for pushing all of these tokens to the LLM. Also, too much irrelevant context can "confuse" the model about the task at hand

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

#34

Post by sestinj »

serjester wrote: post #28

I think I have trouble understanding what this is doing other than maybe some fine-tuned prompts tailored to a specific stack? I'm looking at the data science kit and I don't see why anyone would use this, much less pay for it? I guess you guys have some MCP connections too, but this seems like such a marginal value add (how often am I really pinging these services and do I really want an agent doing that). Regardles…

This is fair feedback—we're so early in building an ecosystem here that the prompts we've shared as starting points are relatively general. But already we've seen people start to build much more carefully-crafted and specific assistants. These are some examples that we've used internally and found to be super useful:

- https://hub.continue.dev/continuedev/playwright-e2e-test

- https://hub.continue.dev/continuedev/vscode

- https://hub.continue.dev/continuedev/service-test-prompt

Importantly, you don't have to pay to use custom assistants! You can think of hub.continue.dev like the NPM registry: it's just a medium for people to create, share, and pull the assistants they want to use. It's always possible to bring your own API key and we provide a Models Add-On mostly for convenience of not needing to keep track of API keys

Value prop of MCP is definitely early, but I would recommend giving Agent mode (https://docs.continue.dev/agent/how-to-use-it) a try if you haven't had the chance—there's something compelling about having the model take the obvious actions for you (though you can of course require approval first!)

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

#35

Post by sestinj »

prophesi wrote: post #30

Very excited for this. The two painpoints I've had with LLM's lately: - Mediocre knowledge of Erlang/Elixir - Reluctance to use the new rune feature in Svelte 5 It sounds like I'd be able to point my local LLM to the official docs for Erlang, Elixir, Phoenix, and all the dependencies in my project. And same for Svelte 5.

I was actually talking to someone the other day who was building an MCP for Continue that could call the Elixir type checker / compiler (which I've heard is quite powerful). I'll need to find this and share—they were saying it made for a really powerful edit -> check -> rewrite loop in Agent mode

Also might be interesting to take a look at these Phoenix rules that someone built: https://hub.continue.dev/peter-mueller/phoenix-rules

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

#36

Post by sestinj »

outside1234 wrote: post #20

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

I think Copilot plays an important role in the world of code assistants, and it's great that they've implemented Agent mode as well.

We'd actually love for them to take part in the standard we're building here—the more people build custom assistants together, the stronger the ecosystem can grow!

If I were to share any one reason why we continue to build Continue when there are so many other coding assistants, it really comes down to one word: choice. We hope to live in a world where developers can build custom prompts, rules, tools, etc. just like we currently build our own bash profiles, Vim shortcuts, and other personal or internal company tools. Lots of room and lots of space for many products, but we want to lead the way on allowing developer choice over models, prompts, and much, much more

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

#37

Post by sestinj »

atonse wrote: post #29
sestinj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ot…

I'm of two minds. I currently use 3 MCPs regularly (Atlassian, Git, and GitHub). And I suppose if GitHub or Atlassian actually hosted first-party MCP endpoints for their services, we probably wouldn't need to self-host? But I wouldn't want to have a third party host where, all they're doing is just running the npx/uvx command themselves and I still have to give them keys, etc. At that point, I'd rather just host them…

Auth definitely seems like the biggest outstanding question with MCP. Local is a great first solution to make it simple, but maybe OAuth integration in the future makes this easier

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

#38

Post by betimsl »

talos_ wrote: post #33
betimsl wrote: post #25

Why separate? It's not like there's limited capacity...you can have an assistant knowing all the languages at once.

I guess you would be paying for pushing all of these tokens to the LLM. Also, too much irrelevant context can "confuse" the model about the task at hand

Check out NVIDIAs latest releases. Paying for tokens is going to be a history in about 6 months. You run the model on your laptop.

Maybe you're right about the confusion...but given the velocity, that's going to be fixed also.

All the knowledge about the field of programming is digitized, one could argue that having a model that digested all that information in a right way, is better than separate.

Just a thought. I don't care all that much.

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

#39

Post by sestinj »

johnisgood wrote: post #15
changhis wrote: post #6

Congrats on the launch! I think this is totally the right next level abstraction for AI-assisted coding. Don’t generate everything from scratch but make it easy to plug in the tools you care about and make the generation way more accurate. Way to go!

What does this mean exactly? I checked the website, and it seems to have very specific assistants. I do not know if I personally could take advantage of this, unless there is going to be a "C assistant" or "OCaml assistant" (or just a "coder" one) or something.

The goal of hub.continue.dev isn't to pre-build exactly what people will need (this might not be possible). We've started with a few examples for inspiration, but the hope is that hub.continue.dev makes it easier for developers to build assistants for themselves that match their personal needs

Even within the subset of developers that use C or OCaml, there are likely to be a large variety of best practices, codebase layouts, and internal knowledge—these are the things we want to empower folks to codify

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

#40

Post by sestinj »

paradite wrote: post #23

I think this is an interesting pivot, but Cursor's project level rules and custom modes will probably quickly evolve to cover all the aspects listed on your hub. (Maybe it already does) This also allows developers to switch between projects quickly while simultaneously also switching the setup for the AI agent.

Agreed! If there's value here, they'll definitely follow behind and have already taken their own creative steps.

One interesting note is that rather than a pivot, the hub was just a continuation of work we'd already been doing—we had a configuration file that tons of people were customizing, but it was just a bit too complicated to get started, so we decided to make that "1 click" easy with the hub

In the long run, we feel that it's not the "features" in the IDE that will separate different AI coding tools (most are a matter of building out new UI), but that the ecosystem will be one of the biggest differentiators

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