Models
Models form the foundation of the entire agent experience, offering different specialized capabilities:
- 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
| Model role | Best open models | Best closed models | Notes |
|---|
| Agent Plan | | | Closed models are slightly better than open models |
| Chat Edit | | | Closed and open models have similar performance |
| Autocomplete | | | Closed models are slightly better than open models |
| Apply | | | Closed models are better than open models |
| Embed | | | Closed models are slightly better than open models |
| Rerank | zerank-1 zerank-1-small | | Open models are beginning to emerge for this model role |
Continue supports
many model providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama, Amazon Bedrock, Azure, xAI, and more. Models can have various roles like
chat,
edit,
apply,
autocomplete,
embed, and
rerank.
- Get your API key from Anthropic
- Add Claude Sonnet 4.6 to your Continue config
- Add
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY to your environment or config
- Click
Reload config in 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_KEY to your environment or config
- Click
Reload config in the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Get your API key from OpenAI
- Add GPT-5 your Continue config
- Add
OPENAI_API_KEY to your environment or config
- Click
Reload config in the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Get your API key from OpenRouter
- Add Kimi K2 your Continue config
- Add
OPENROUTER_API_KEY to your environment or config
- Click
Reload config in 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_KEY to your environment or config
- Click
Reload config in 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_KEY to your environment or config
- Click
Reload config in the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Get your API key from Mistral AI
- Add Devstral Medium your Continue config
- Add
MISTRAL_API_KEY to your environment or config
- Click
Reload config in the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Get your API key from OpenRouter
- Add gpt-oss-120b your Continue config
- Add
OPENROUTER_API_KEY to your environment or config
- Click
Reload config in the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
These models can be run on your computer if you have enough VRAM.
Their limited tool calling and reasoning capabilities will make it challenging to use agent mode.
- Add Qwen3 Coder 30B your Continue config
- Run the model with Ollama
- Click
Reload config in the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Add gpt-oss-20b your Continue config
- Run the model with Ollama
- Click
Reload config in the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Add Devstral Small your Continue config
- Run the model with Ollama
- Click
Reload config in the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Add Qwen2.5-Coder 7B your Continue config
- Run the model with Ollama
- Click
Reload config in the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Add Gemma 3 4B your Continue config
- Run the model with Ollama
- Click
Reload config in the config selector in the Continue IDE extension
- Add Qwen2.5-Coder 1.5B your Continue config
- Run the model with Ollama
- Click
Reload config in the config selector in the Continue IDE extension