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

hub.continue.dev

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

#1

Post by sestinj »

Hi HN. We are Nate and Ty, co-founders of Continue (https://www.continue.dev), which enables developers to create, share, and use custom AI code assistants. Today, we are launching Continue Hub and sharing what we’ve learned since our Show HN that introduced our open-source VS Code extension in July 2023 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882146).

At Continue, we've always believed that developers should be amplified, not automated. A key aspect of this philosophy is providing choices that let you customize your AI code assistant to fit your specific needs, workflows, and preferences.

The AI-native development landscape constantly evolves with new models, MCP servers, assistant rules, etc. emerging daily. Continue's open architecture connects this ecosystem, ensuring your custom code assistants always leverage the best available resources rather than locking you into yesterday's technology.

The Continue Hub makes it even easier to customize with a registry for defining, managing, and sharing building blocks (e.g. models, rules, MCP servers, etc). These building blocks can be combined into custom AI code assistants, which you can use with our open-source VS Code and JetBrains extensions (https://github.com/continuedev/continue).

Here are a few examples of different custom AI code assistants that we’ve built to show how it works:

A custom assistant that specializes in helping with data load tool (dlt) using their MCP: https://www.loom.com/share/baf843d860f44a91b8c580063fcfbf4a?...

A custom assistant that specializes in helping with Dioxus using only models from Mistral: https://www.loom.com/share/87583774753045b1b3c12327e662ea38?...

A custom assistant that specializes in helping with LanceDB using the best LLMs from any vendor via their public APIs (Anthropic, Voyage AI, etc): https://www.loom.com/share/3059a35f8b6f436699ab9c1d1421fc8d?...

Over the last 18+ months since our Show HN, our community has rapidly grown to 25k+ GitHub stars, 12.5k+ Discord members, and hundreds of thousands of users. This happened because developers want to understand how their tools work, figure out how to better use them, and shape them to fit their development practices / environments. Continue does not constrain their creativity like the vertically integrated, proprietary black box AI code assistants that lack transparency and offer limited customizability.

Before Continue Hub, developers faced specific technical challenges when building custom AI assistants. They manually maintained separate configuration files for different models, wrestled with breaking API changes from providers, and built redundant context retrieval systems from scratch. We've seen teams spend weeks setting up systems that should take hours. Many developers abandoned the effort entirely, finding it impossible to keep up with the rapidly evolving ecosystem of models and tools.

Our open-source IDE extensions now read a standardized configuration format that fully specifies an AI code assistant's capabilities—from models and context providers to prompts and rules. Continue Hub hosts these configurations, syncs them with your IDE, and adds versioning, permissions, and sharing. Assistants are composed of atomic "blocks" that use a common yaml format, all managed through our registry with both free solo and paid team plans.

We're releasing Continue 1.0 today, which includes both Continue Hub and the first major release of our Apache 2.0 licensed VS Code and JetBrains extensions. While the Hub currently only supports our IDE extensions, we've designed the underlying architecture to support other tools in the future (https://blog.continue.dev/continue-1-0). The config format is intentionally tool-agnostic—if you're interested in integrating with it or have ideas for improvement, we'd love to hear your thoughts!

Launch HN: Continue (YC S23) – Create custom AI code assistants
hub.continue.dev

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

#4

Post by sestinj »

talos_ wrote: post #2

Congrats on the launch HN! I've been following the IDE + LLM space. What's Continue's differentiator vs GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Cline, Claude Desktop, etc. ? What are you looking to build over the next year?

Thank you! The biggest difference in our approach is the goal of allowing for custom assistants. What we've found is that most developers work in entirely different environments, whether that be IDE, tech stack, best practices, enterprise requirements, etc. The baseline features that we've come to expect from a coding assistant are amazing, but to truly meet people where they are it takes something different for everyone. Over the last two years we've seen tons of people customizing, and with hub.continue.dev we just want to make that accessible to all, and hope that people will share what they learn.

We're going to keep building at the edge of what's possible in the IDE, including focusing on Agent mode (https://docs.continue.dev/agent/how-to-use-it), next edit prediction, and much more. And we're going to keep making it easier to build custom assistants as the ecosystem grows!

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

#7

Post by addandsubtract »

This looks great, but there's a bug on the "Remix" page that prevents me from actually customizing my own bot. Whenever there's a new API request to "/remix" (GET or POST), the form elements reset to their original value, making the changes impossible to save. At least in Firefox.

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

#8

Post by sestinj »

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!

Yeah we think that MCP was a really solid building block at a lower level but ultimately a higher level abstraction is what will make customization really accessible. Being able to define rules, models, MCP servers, docs, prompts, data flow, all in one seems to be important

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

#9

Post by sestinj »

addandsubtract wrote: post #7

This looks great, but there's a bug on the "Remix" page that prevents me from actually customizing my own bot. Whenever there's a new API request to "/remix" (GET or POST), the form elements reset to their original value, making the changes impossible to save. At least in Firefox.

Thanks for the report, we should be able to fix this in the next hour or so. A workaround would be to copy the YAML definition displayed on the page of the assistant / block you want to remix. Will keep you updated!
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