Local AI Code Assistant: Continue
Local AI coding assistants in 2026: Continue for autocomplete, Tabby for a team server, Cline for agentic edits.
Three open source coding assistants, three jobs
Continue (36,328 stars) is the editor plugin for inline completion and chat. Tabby (33,923 stars) is a self-hosted completion server a whole team points at. Cline (70,867 stars) is the agent that reads the repository, edits multiple files and runs commands with approval. Star counts as of October 2026.
The single biggest quality lever with Continue is using two models: a 1.5B model for autocomplete so latency stays low, and a 7B model for chat and edits. One 7B model doing both makes typing feel laggy.
Tabby's advantage over the others is fine-tuning on a private repository, which teaches completion the team's internal SDK conventions.
Cline works best in small steps: one file or function per request, keep human approval on, and prefer repositories with tests. Local 7B models lose track of goals on long agentic tasks more often than frontier cloud models.
Hardware: 8GB VRAM for a 7B at Q4, 16GB to 24GB for 14B plus agent work. Code stays local in all three, but check that anonymous telemetry is disabled.
Written by our editorial team; tools listed here are tested or verified against public sources. Links point to official sites or GitHub repos for reference only — no paid placements.