5 AI Extensions to Help Improve Your VS Code Experience
You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again: AI is here to stay, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. AI has worked its way into just about every corner of life, including programming.
I can hear the groans already.
But even though it is possible to have AI do your coding for you, those who are against that idea can still adopt AI for things other than writing the full code for an app. AI can be used to enhance your coding workflow, help debug code, clean up your code, and much more.
How do you use AI for programming? If VS Code is your IDE of choice, it’s actually quite simple, thanks to the plethora of extensions that can be added to the application. The big question then becomes, which extensions should you use?
Obviously, every project is different, so not every AI extension will serve your needs. Even so, there’s always something that can help boost your productivity and creativity.
Let’s dive in and talk about a few VS Code extensions that might help you out.
1. Continue.dev
Continue.dev is an open source AI code assistant that integrates directly into VS Code (as well as other IDEs). This extension allows developers to leverage various AI models (both local and cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance their coding workflow. Continue makes it easy for teams to build shared AI coding assistants that include customizable tools, centralized configs, and secure credential management. Continue allows you to choose the models you want to work with (both local and remote), while keeping full oversight of both data and collaboration. Some of the key features of Continue include:
- AI-powered code suggestions and autocomplete.
- Code editing and modification.
- Interact with an LLM inside the IDE to ask questions about the codebase, get explanations, and receive assistance with debugging or understanding code sections.
- Supports the creation and use of custom AI agents that are tailored to specific development needs and workflows.
- Offers flexibility to connect with a wide range of LLMs.
- Utilizes various sources of context, such as code, documentation, terminal output, and codebase structure.
- Open source, which means it allows for transparency, community contributions, and customization.
If you’re a solo developer, you can use Continue for free. Team pricing comes out at $10/user/month, and you must connect with Continue.dev to inquire about the Enterprise edition.
2. llama.vscode
The llama.vscode extension is for local LLM-assisted text completion, chat with AI, and agentic coding. This extension has a ton of features, including auto-suggest on input, suggestion acceptance via Tab, accept the first line of a suggestion with Shift+Tab, accept the next word with Ctrl/Cmd + Right, control max text generation time, configure the scope of context, support for very large contexts, performance stats, Llama Agent for agentic coding, add/remove/export/import for models, add/remove/export/import for env, predefined envs for different use cases, MCP tools, and search/download models from Huggingface from within the extension. Llama.vscode does integrate with llama.cpp which is an open source framework (C/C++) that is designed for efficient inference of large language models (LLMs) on a wide range of hardware. Llama.vscode is free to install and use on any operating system that supports local installations of Llama.
Llama.vscode is free to install and use.
3. llama-swap
Llama-swap VSCode extension is a lightweight VS Code transparent proxy server that provides automatic model swapping to llama.cpp’s server. With llama-swap, you can do on-demand model switching, run multiple models at once with Groups, automatic unloading of models via timeout, Docker and Podman support, and much more. What can you do with llama-swap? Simply put, llama-swap is a tool that is designed to automatically load, manage, and switch between multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) used for coding assistance tasks like auto-completion and chat. Do make sure you read through the installation section for this extension, as it can be a bit more complex than others.
Llama-swap is free to install and use.
4. Cline
The Cline VSCode extension is a coding agent that operates as an agent within the Visual Studio Code IDE, and leverages large language models (LLMs) to automate various development tasks, such as writing and refactoring code, running commands, and even interacting with web browsers for debugging and testing.
Cline features:
- Agentic Capabilities.
- Deep Context Understanding.
- Human-in-the-Loop Control.
- Model Agnosticism.
- Transparency.
- Custom Tools and Rules.
- Plan Mode.
Cline is free to install and use.
5. Roo Code
Roo Code works as an AI-powered autonomous coding agent, and is available as an extension for Visual Studio Code. Roo Code integrates AI development capabilities directly into your editor, acting as a coding assistant that understands project context and automates various development tasks. Key features found in Roo Code include:
- Code Generation.
- Adaptable models.
- Code refactoring and debugging assistance.
- Documentation generation.
- Automated tasks.
- External tool integration.
- Memory and context management.
- Structured task management.
Roo Code is free to install and use.
There are plenty more AI extensions to be had in the VS Code extension marketplace. Make sure to comb through the various options and install whatever might help you with your project or even learning a new language.
