Continue Newsletter: Monthly Updates

Continue Updates

🧇 The JetBrains extension was officially released to the store—it is still going through alpha testing, but it has already reached full feature parity with VS Code

🔍 Codebase retrieval is now available in the VS Code pre-release, which allows you to cmd+enter to “talk to your codebase” using vector embeddings and other methods

🏕️ To improve stability before official releases, there are now pre-release versions of the VS Code extension as well as platform-specific extension packages

🖍️ We've added file icons in the sidebar and a more a more intuitive way of viewing selected context items: toggle to view them inline or click to open the file directly

⚡️ To make the UI more reliable, there was a major refactor that makes it more snappy, less clunky, and eliminates having to wait too long for “Starting Continue Server”

DevAI Updates

🧰 What LLM to use? A perspective from the DevAI space walks you through the most popular commercial and open-source models that are being used while coding

🪼 Developers are the first group to adopt AI at work. Here’s why that matters provides some insight into how software development is already evolving due to LLMs

🌲 How to use a Large Language Model while coding shares some ideas for how to think about using LLMs while coding and tells you about the common mistakes to avoid

☀️ Large Language Models for Software Engineering: Survey and Open Problems gives an overview of the state of research on code LLMs as of October 2023

🌶️ Awesome-DevAI is a curated list of resources about DevAI—the community of developers building software with the help of LLMs—that can help you get up to speed

Upcoming Events

1️⃣ Office hours at 10am PT on Saturdays will continue on the Continue Discord in Nov

2️⃣ Ty will be in Berlin from Nov 13th to 17th. Reach out to meet up and discuss DevAI!

3️⃣ The last DevAI meetup in San Francisco this year will be on Nov 30th. RSVP here : )

Did you know?

When you want Continue to start fresh with new context, you can press cmd+option+n in VS Code or cmd+ctrl+n in JetBrains to begin a new session

Continue Updates

🐳 Codebase embeddings let you ask questions about your workspace (experimental)

💫 We started alpha testing the JetBrains extension with early users this past week

🚒 Use /cmd to generate a command and have it automatically placed in your terminal

🐍 We integrated w/ the Language Server Protocol in Python (more languages soon!)

🌊 New LLM providers: LM Studio, HuggingFace TGI, and the Google PaLM API

👑 Make adjustments using cmd+shift+m w/ follow-up edits after a diff is generated

DevAI Updates

🪂 Mistral AI 7B, which "approaches CodeLlama 7B performance on code, while remaining good at English tasks", was released on September 27th

🌳 Imbue announced $200 million in new funding to "build practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals" by developing models that can code and “robustly reason”

💎 83% of respondents to the state of AI in software development survey from GitLab cited implementing AI as necessary in their software development

Upcoming Events

1️⃣ Office hours at 10am PT on Saturdays will continue on Discord in October

2️⃣ We will be attending Heavybit's DevGuild: AI Summit on October 19th

3️⃣ There will be another in-person meetup in San Francisco on October 26th

Did you know?

You can add not just one but multiple sections of code as context by highlighting each one and pressing cmd+m (MacOS) / ctrl+m (Windows)

What's new?

🦙 Code Llama from Meta AI dropped on August 24th! Many of you began using it through Continue via Ollama, Replicate, and Together, and posts about us ended up on the front page of Hacker News that day as well as the next week.

✏️ There are many new opportunities for customizing Continue, including custom chat templates, the ability to use separate models for edit/chat, a handful of new model providers, and GUI that allows you to quickly swap models, set the system message, or change the temperature

🔁 Tommy Ubongabasi, a full-stack developer from Uyo, Nigeria and Continue power user, wrote about how he uses Continue to accelerate his workflows.

📜 There are lots of new features and improvements to the Continue GUI, allowing you to browse session history (i.e. click the file icon at the bottom to browse and resume past Continue sessions), save groups of context for later with bookmarks, easily toggle between models with the new dropdown, edit past messages, and navigate entirely with keyboard shortcuts (e.g. option+cmd+m to toggle Continue, cmd+shift+m to edit, etc).

🧑‍💻 @bra1nDump delivered huge improvements to the contributor experience by shipping a two-click setup after cloning the repository, the ability to debug from a single window, and an initial foundation for unit testing.

🖥 There are four new context providers: ‘@url’ (reference documentation pages), ‘@diff’ (lets you show the LLM all the changes you’ve made), ‘@search’ (brings the exact same search engine used by VS Code to Continue), and ‘@terminal’ (reference tracebacks or other output in your prompt). All context providers also now work on Windows. Additionally, @bra1nDump improved the relevancy in the '@' dropdown as well as allowing bookmarked URLs for the URLContextProvider.

📦 We launched on Product Hunt at the beginning of the month and finished the day at #9. Thanks to all of you who upvoted our launch post and made this happen!

💪 And last but certainly not least, thank you to everyone else who contributed this month: @elabbarw, @eltociear, @T3tr0, @mshameti, @CambridgeComputing, and @jmorganca!

What's upcoming?

1️⃣ Weekly updates. If the monthly summary above is not enough, join the Discord to see everything that's new each week.

2️⃣ Weekly office hours. We hang out and chat with the community each week on our Discord. Join if you want to ask questions or want to discuss something with us.

3️⃣ First Continue meetup in SF. Later this month, we will be meeting in person in San Francisco with the community. We will post in the Discord with more details soon!

Did you know?

If you run into an error or exception in your terminal, you can pass it to Continue with a keyboard shortcut: cmd+shift+r (MacOS) / ctrl+shift+r (Windows) 🪲

How can you help?

⬆️ Press the "Notify me" button here and then upvote our Product Hunt launch on Tuesday

💬 Join our Discord and chat with us about your experience using Continue

💪 Open a GitHub Issue with a bug you found or a feature request you have

What's new?

⚡ Easily switch LLMs in the Continue config file (thanks to an awesome PR by @lun-4!)

🦙 Run Llama-2 locally with Ollama and even set it as your default (shoutout to @mchiang0610 for the PR)

🐍 Continue is now packaged using Pyinstaller, meaning faster download times and fewer reliability issues

💻 Keyboard shortcuts to manage context, toggle Continue, and more

🐛 Dozens of bug fixes, including PRs from @3cognito on docs links and @sanders41 on Meilisearch client usage

✍️ Improvements to the Continue Docs (e.g. new troubleshooting docs and customization updates)

Did you know?

If you like to be able to see your files and folders at all times, you can drag Continue over to the right side of your window 🤯

If you liked this blog post and want to read more about DevAI–the community of folks building software with the help of LLMs–in the future, join our monthly newsletter here.