Let's be honest. Everyone's hyping Continue as the "must-have" IDE agent, but when you actually run the numbers, what are you paying for? A slightly faster autocomplete than what you get for free?
I've been testing it against the free tier of other tools (and even just using GitHub Copilot Chat directly) for the last month. The claimed "context awareness" and "deep workflow integration" sound great in theory. In practice, for most standard tasks, the difference in time-to-solution is measured in seconds, not minutes.
The real cost isn't just the monthly subscription. It's the lock-in.
* You're buying into their specific workflow. Try extracting your "trained" context or prompts when you want to switch.
* The ROI calculation falls apart unless you're spending hours a day asking it to refactor entire codebases. For sporadic use? Forget it.
* The hidden cost is the mental shift. You start structuring your problems around the tool's capabilities, not the most efficient way to solve them.
For $20-30/month per user, I expect a transformative productivity leap, not a marginal improvement over free alternatives. Most devs would be better off mastering their IDE's native tools and using a free chat agent for the occasional tricky problem. This feels like paying a premium for a hype bubble.
trust but verify