I need to correct something from when I first looked at this: I wrote about Continue.dev as a live, actively-developed Cursor alternative, and that’s no longer accurate. Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, acquired Continue Dev, Inc. in an acqui-hire announced June 16, 2026 — its third acquisition in eighteen months after Supermaven and Graphite. A final release, v2.0.0, shipped June 19. The continuedev/continue repository is now read-only. There is no team building new features anymore.
What Continue.dev actually offered, for the two years it was active, was genuinely uncommon: full BYOK support — Claude, GPT, Gemini, or a local model through Ollama, no vendor lock — with real, equally-supported chat, autocomplete, inline editing, and agent mode across both VS Code and every major JetBrains IDE, configured through a version-controllable YAML file. Most BYOK tools are VS Code-first with JetBrains support as an afterthought, if it exists at all. Continue was the exception, sitting around 35,800 GitHub stars, Apache 2.0, before the acquisition.
The timing is what makes this genuinely strange rather than just another shutdown. The same week Continue got folded into Cursor, SpaceX announced its own $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company — the story I wrote about separately, where OpenAI responded by cutting Cursor off from its models entirely. So the ownership chain, in the space of about a week, went: an independent, model-agnostic BYOK tool → owned by Cursor → Cursor owned by SpaceX. Everything that made Continue worth recommending as “the thing you use so no single company’s decisions can strand you” now sits downstream of exactly the kind of acquisition its own pitch was implicitly protecting against.
Practically: the extension still installs and still runs. Nothing was remotely disabled, and if you already have a working config.yaml, it should keep functioning for a while. But there will be no security patches, no fixes when a model provider changes its API, and cloud-hosted settings sync was shut down after a July 15 data-export deadline that’s already passed. New installs aren’t a good idea at this point — you’d be adopting a tool with a fixed feature set and no one addressing what breaks next.
If Continue’s specific shape — full JetBrains parity plus BYOK — was what you actually wanted, the honest current answer is a combination rather than a single replacement: Cline for VS Code specifically, Kilo Code if broader JetBrains support matters more, or Aider if you don’t need an IDE at all. None of them is a perfect one-to-one swap, which is really the point — Continue filled a genuinely narrow gap, and losing it removes an option rather than just redirecting you to an equivalent one.
