Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Continue

I’m excited to welcome our newest portfolio company, Continue, which gives software engineers the power to streamline their development process using large language models (LLMs) and hit flow state faster and longer.

We’re all familiar with the exciting promise of generative AI and its potential to dramatically increase productivity for professional developers. However, while devs are already using popular LLM tools such as ChatGPT to enhance their coding workflows, they’re also finding painful new roadblocks along the way.

Why We’re Excited

Ideally, developers coding with LLMs should be hitting their flow state and getting huge productivity boosts. While we’ve seen impressive examples of AI tools instantly spinning up projects based on barebones prompts, the day-to-day business of coding with LLMs tends to be more involved, and significantly less glamorous.

In real life, developers using LLM products to assist with coding are finding themselves burning through excessive cycles just struggling with tool interfaces and nitpicky edits, switching back and forth between different environments so they can inject much-needed context and relevant suggestions into their codebases. As a result, they’re spending far too much time repeatedly tweaking code they’ve copied to and from their LLM tools, inserting, editing, re-inserting, re-prompting, and copying again.

The Continue team has built an open-source solution that natively integrates LLMs directly with the IDE, eliminating time-intensive copy-pasting and editing across different environments and tools. Better still, Continue lets you collect data as you use the LLMs, so that your team can use it to improve suggestions from LLMs in the future. And the Continue team has built its product to be deeply customizable, so that devs can adapt it to fit their workflows.

It’s time to fully realize the potential of generative AI to streamline the modern development process, and we can’t wait to see how the Continue team’s product unblocks and accelerates LLM-based development.

In the coming year, Continue will be growing its team to enhance and expand its offering. Learn more about how Continue works, or get started with Continue on VS Code or JetBrains.

Meet The Founders

Tyler Dunn

Co-Founder & CEO, Continue

Ty Dunn is the CEO and co-founder of Continue. While studying the intersection of language and computation at the University of Michigan, he built dialogue management systems as a software engineer. Motivated to make them leverage machine learning more, he grew from the first product manager to a Group PM at Rasa, where his open-source ML framework for conversational interfaces had millions of downloads, 17k stars on GitHub, and was used by ~10% of the Fortune 500.

Nate Sesti

Co-Founder & CTO, Continue

Nate Sesti is CTO and co-founder of Continue. During his time studying math and physics at MIT, he published research on graph neural networks and has since worked as the first engineer at Mayan (YC W21) and built mission control software at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.