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Tools

Tools allow Continue to take action in your IDE and beyond (when you give permission). Currently, they are only supported for the following providers:

To use tools, click on the icon in the input toolbar like below.

tools

To let you balance speed and safety, each tool can be set to 1 of 3 modes:

  • Automatic: When the LLM requests to use the tool, Continue will automatically call it and send the response to the LLM.
  • Allowed: When the LLM requests to use the tool, Continue will first give you the opportunity to "Cancel" or "Continue" with the tool.
  • Disabled: The LLM will not know about or be able to use the tool.

Custom tools​

Currently custom tools can be configured using the Model Context Protocol, a standard proposed by Anthropic to unify prompts, context, and tool use. Read their quickstart to learn how to set up a local server and then configure your config.json like this:

~/.continue/config.json
{
  "experimental": {
    "modelContextProtocolServers": [
      {
        "transport": {
          "type": "stdio",
          "command": "uvx",
          "args": ["mcp-server-sqlite", "--db-path", "/Users/NAME/test.db"]
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}