How to Set Up Continue.dev (Step by Step)

Before installing Continue.dev, get the boring parts out of the way: confirm it runs on the platform you actually use, and that you have whatever account it requires; it is listed as free, so expect an account rather than a payment step. Because it leans toward ai and ide, check that the tools you want it to sit alongside are ready too, so the first run is not blocked waiting on something else.

Most people race through installing a ai coding tools product and only slow down once something is already wrong, so treat the install itself as worth five careful minutes: start from Continue.dev's own site rather than a search result or a mirror, since that is the only place the current build and correct defaults are guaranteed to live. Open source AI assistant that works inside VS Code and JetBrains. Bring your own model (Claude, GPT, Ollama, etc). Full privacy control since you choose where data goes. Growing fast among developers who want AI help without vendor lock-in. Current status matters here: Continue's own site now announces it has been acquired by Cursor, while stating its open-source codebase remains freely available and framing its mission as keeping developers amplified, not automated. The bring-your-own-model design is what keeps it interesting for privacy-minded teams, since inference can still point at a local runtime. Read each prompt as it appears rather than clicking through, permissions requested, workspace access, any account it wants to connect, because these are far easier to grant deliberately during setup than to walk back afterward.

Defaults are a vendor's opinion about the average user, and configuring Continue.dev well mostly means finding where your situation is not average. Start with the settings that create commitments: where the product stores what you put into it, who can see that material, and which external services it talks to. Noizz lists its privacy classification as excellent, which is a useful prior, then verify it against the sharing and retention controls the product actually exposes, because a rating describes the policy while the toggles describe your account. The ai side of the settings deserves disproportionate attention here, since that is the capability you presumably chose it for.

Ten minutes of real use tells you more about Continue.dev than an hour of reading about it, provided the ten minutes are spent on one genuine task rather than a tour of menus. Pick the specific job that made you want the product in the first place and run it start to finish, without stopping to configure everything else along the way. That first task is worth anchoring in its ai and ide focus, since a product's weaknesses tend to surface first in the area it claims to be strongest. If something about the flow disappoints you, it will show up on this first honest pass, not on the fifth time you revisit the settings page.

Most early problems with a ai coding tools tool are not bugs in Continue.dev: they are permissions, an account on the wrong plan, or a connection to another tool that was never fully authorised. Check those three before assuming something is broken. If the issue survives that, the product's own status page, docs, and issue tracker will tell you faster than a general search whether it is you or them. There is active community discussion of Continue.dev on Noizz worth reading alongside this analysis.