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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 with Anthropic. 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": {
    "modelContextProtocolServer": {
      "transport": {
        "type": "stdio",
        "command": "uvx",
        "args": ["mcp-server-sqlite", "--db-path", "/Users/NAME/test.db"]
      }
    }
  }
}