- Chat: Power conversational interactions about code and provide detailed guidance
- Edit: Handle complex code transformations and refactoring tasks
- Apply: Execute targeted code modifications with high accuracy
- Autocomplete: Provide real-time suggestions as developers type
- Embedding: Transform code into vector representations for semantic search
- Reranker: Improve search relevance by ordering results based on semantic meaning
Recommended Models
Best Models by Role
Learn More About Models
Continue supports many model providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama, Amazon Bedrock, Azure, xAI, and more. Models can have various roles likechat, edit, apply, autocomplete, embed, and rerank.
Read more about model roles, model capabilities and view models in the YAML Reference.
Example Model Setup Instructions
Frontier Models
Claude Sonnet 4.6 from Anthropic- Get your API key from Anthropic
- Add Claude Sonnet 4.6 to your Continue config
- Add
ANTHROPIC_API_KEYto your environment or config - Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Get your API key from OpenRouter
- Add Qwen Coder 3 480B your Continue config
- Add
OPENROUTER_API_KEYto your environment or config - Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Get your API key from OpenAI
- Add GPT-5 your Continue config
- Add
OPENAI_API_KEYto your environment or config - Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Get your API key from OpenRouter
- Add Kimi K2 your Continue config
- Add
OPENROUTER_API_KEYto your environment or config - Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Get your API key from Google AI Studio
- Add Gemini 3.1 Pro your Continue config
- Add
GEMINI_API_KEYto your environment or config - Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Get your API key from xAI
- Add Grok Code Fast 1 your Continue config
- Add
XAI_API_KEYto your environment or config - Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Get your API key from Mistral AI
- Add Devstral Medium your Continue config
- Add
MISTRAL_API_KEYto your environment or config - Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Get your API key from OpenRouter
- Add gpt-oss-120b your Continue config
- Add
OPENROUTER_API_KEYto your environment or config - Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
Local Models
Need a quick setup walkthrough? Check out Using Ollama with Continue: A Developer’s Guide.
- Add Qwen3 Coder 30B your Continue config
- Run the model with Ollama
- Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Add gpt-oss-20b your Continue config
- Run the model with Ollama
- Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Add Devstral Small your Continue config
- Run the model with Ollama
- Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Add Qwen2.5-Coder 7B your Continue config
- Run the model with Ollama
- Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Add Gemma 3 4B your Continue config
- Run the model with Ollama
- Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Add Qwen2.5-Coder 1.5B your Continue config
- Run the model with Ollama
- Click
Reload configin the config selector in the Continue IDE extension