Local AI Coding Assistant: Free Cursor Alternative with VS Code, Ollama & Continue

The cost and privacy implications of cloud-based AI coding assistants like Cursor have driven interest in self-hosted alternatives. This guide demonstrates how to implement a fully local coding assistant using VS Code, Ollama for model serving, and the Continue extension for IDE integration. The setup maintains all code and inference on-device, eliminating concerns about proprietary code exposure to cloud providers.

Ollama has become the go-to runtime for local LLM deployment due to its simplicity and broad model support. The article walks through the integration, showing developers how to select appropriate local models, configure the Continue extension, and optimize for responsive code completion and context understanding. This approach provides feature parity with commercial offerings at zero subscription cost.

For development teams and individual practitioners, maintaining code privacy while leveraging AI assistance is increasingly feasible with mature local tooling. This setup is particularly valuable in regulated industries, enterprise environments, or situations where model output training exposure is a concern.

Source: SitePoint · Relevance: 9/10