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I've enjoyed using Continue and really appreciated the focus on customizability. But my problem with Continue has been the lack of stability. I'll often bounce

by dimal 2y ago

I've enjoyed using Continue and really appreciated the focus on customizability. But my problem with Continue has been the lack of stability. I'll often bounce from one tool to another, so I might not use it for a couple weeks. Almost every time I come back to it, the extension is broken in some way. I've reinstalled it many many times. I kinda gave up on it and stuck with Cody, even though I like the feature set of Continue better. (Cody eventually broke on me, too, but that's another can of worms.) Is the Continue team aware of this stability issue and are you planning on focusing on that more now that you've launched? It seems like you've been moving fast and breaking things, which makes sense for a while, but I can't hitch my wagon to something that's going to break on me.

sqs 2y ago
What broke on you when using Cody? Sorry to hear about that and want to fix it for you.
- dimal 2y ago
  Thanks for asking. This may be more information than you were expecting, but here goes! I tried to use it one day and was confronted by a cryptic auth error. It looked like a raw HTML error page but it was rendering in the side panel as plain text. So I tried logging out an logging back in again. That got me a different cryptic auth error. Then I noticed I had accidentally left my VPN on, so I turned that off, but the extension seemed to have gotten stuck in some state that it couldn't recover from. I'd either get an auth error, or it simply wouldn't ever complete auth. I even reinstalled, but couldn't get it to log me in. So I contacted support. The experience didn't exactly spark joy. Once I got a response, the support person suggested I send more details, including logs. But they didn't say where I could find those logs. I'm a customer - how would I know where the logs are? Anyway, I uploaded a video of the bug on the web tracker, but later the support person said they never got it. The upload had apparently failed, but I didn't get an error when I uploaded it, so I didn't know that. After I asked for the location of the logs, they sent me instructions for where to find them. But I was busy and couldn't respond for a few days, so then the system sent me an automatic message saying that since they hadn't heard from me, my issue would be closed. Ugh. I sent another email saying to keep the issue open. Then I sent the logs, and the support person told me to try logging in with a token and gave me instructions. That worked! It took about a week and a half to sort it out, so I asked for a refund for my trouble. I was told that no refund or credit would be given. This left a sour taste in my mouth. It's not about the money. Credit for lost time using the service would have been around $2. It's more about what it means, that the company values my time and trouble, and this issue cost me a lot of time and trouble. I hope that I'm not ruining this support person's day. My sense is that these kinds of things are usually due to training and policy, and they were probably just following their training. It's a shame because Cody definitely has a much better UX than Continue. It does a lot of smart things by default that are really helpful. So I was ready to stick with it, but this experience definitely made me ready to try Continue again. Hope this helps!
  - sqs 2y ago
    Thank you, and I’m sorry about that. Will look into this and fix on our side.
sestinj 2y ago
I'm sorry you ran into problems repeatedly, and couldn't agree more. As much as we've aimed to innovate on customization, it does not have to be an either/or. We recognized this, heard a lot from the community, and the goal of our 1.0 was to focus ourselves very seriously on stability. Going forward we are going to continue to treat Continue as the foundational tool that we hope it can be. This has meant investment in testing, clearer contributing guidelines, and a general mindset shift to understand that AI code assistants have become fundamental to developer workflows and have to be rock solid (when something is doing work on every keystroke, it better not break!) If you get the chance to try the 1.0, I'd love to hear whether you find it better, or if you think we can do even better—we think it's in a solid place and it'll always be improving from here.
- dimal 2y ago
  That’s great to hear! I’ll give it another shot!

by dimal 2y ago

sqs 2y ago

What broke on you when using Cody? Sorry to hear about that and want to fix it for you.

dimal 2y ago
Thanks for asking. This may be more information than you were expecting, but here goes! I tried to use it one day and was confronted by a cryptic auth error. It looked like a raw HTML error page but it was rendering in the side panel as plain text. So I tried logging out an logging back in again. That got me a different cryptic auth error. Then I noticed I had accidentally left my VPN on, so I turned that off, but the extension seemed to have gotten stuck in some state that it couldn't recover from. I'd either get an auth error, or it simply wouldn't ever complete auth. I even reinstalled, but couldn't get it to log me in. So I contacted support. The experience didn't exactly spark joy. Once I got a response, the support person suggested I send more details, including logs. But they didn't say where I could find those logs. I'm a customer - how would I know where the logs are? Anyway, I uploaded a video of the bug on the web tracker, but later the support person said they never got it. The upload had apparently failed, but I didn't get an error when I uploaded it, so I didn't know that. After I asked for the location of the logs, they sent me instructions for where to find them. But I was busy and couldn't respond for a few days, so then the system sent me an automatic message saying that since they hadn't heard from me, my issue would be closed. Ugh. I sent another email saying to keep the issue open. Then I sent the logs, and the support person told me to try logging in with a token and gave me instructions. That worked! It took about a week and a half to sort it out, so I asked for a refund for my trouble. I was told that no refund or credit would be given. This left a sour taste in my mouth. It's not about the money. Credit for lost time using the service would have been around $2. It's more about what it means, that the company values my time and trouble, and this issue cost me a lot of time and trouble. I hope that I'm not ruining this support person's day. My sense is that these kinds of things are usually due to training and policy, and they were probably just following their training. It's a shame because Cody definitely has a much better UX than Continue. It does a lot of smart things by default that are really helpful. So I was ready to stick with it, but this experience definitely made me ready to try Continue again. Hope this helps!
- sqs 2y ago
  Thank you, and I’m sorry about that. Will look into this and fix on our side.

sestinj 2y ago

I'm sorry you ran into problems repeatedly, and couldn't agree more. As much as we've aimed to innovate on customization, it does not have to be an either/or. We recognized this, heard a lot from the community, and the goal of our 1.0 was to focus ourselves very seriously on stability. Going forward we are going to continue to treat Continue as the foundational tool that we hope it can be. This has meant investment in testing, clearer contributing guidelines, and a general mindset shift to understand that AI code assistants have become fundamental to developer workflows and have to be rock solid (when something is doing work on every keystroke, it better not break!) If you get the chance to try the 1.0, I'd love to hear whether you find it better, or if you think we can do even better—we think it's in a solid place and it'll always be improving from here.

dimal 2y ago
That’s great to hear! I’ll give it another shot!