In a previous posted I introduced you to Continue in combination with Ollama, as a way to run a fully local AI Code Assistant.
Remark: This post is part of a bigger series. Here are the other related posts:
- Part 1 – Introduction
- Part 2 - Configuration
- Part 3 – Editing and Actions
- Part 4 - Learning from your codebase
- Part 5 – Read your documentation
- Part 6 (this post) – Troubleshooting
Although Continue really looks promising, I stumbled on some hurdles along the way. Here are some tips in case you encounter issues:
Tip 1 - Check the Continue logs
My first tip is to always check the logs. Continue provides good logging inside the IDE, So go to the output tab and switch to the Continue source to get the generated output:
Tip 2 – Check the Continue LLM logs
Next to the output of Continue itself, you can find all the LLM specific logs in the Continue LLM Prompt/Conversation output. So don’t forget to check that output as well:
Tip 3 – Be patient
When executing a heavy operation, like for example indexing a documentation website, be aware that this can take some time. While such a heavy operation is in progress, continue doesn’t give much feedback what could make you think that the action failed.
So be patient and just wait a little longer…
Tip 4 – A restart can help
While using Continue I noticed that a change didn’t immediately had effect. For example, adding a new document source or adding a new custom command. In that case, just restarting VS Code helped a few times.
So give it a try…
Tip 5 – Check the config.json file
There are a lot of things that can be configured and tweaked inside Continue.
So the config.json file is the go to place. Therefore hit ctrl+shift+p and choose Continue: open config.json.
Now you can see all the configuration details and start tweaking them(don’t forget tip 4 and restart VS Code after doing your changes).
Tip 6 – Use the Developer Console to get more details
As a last resort, you can check the developer console logs of VSCode. Therefore hit ctrl+shift+p and choose Developer: Toggle Developer Tools.
Here you can go to the console tab and view all the log messages:
Remark: Change the log level to Verbose by clicking the dropdown at the top that says "Default levels" and select "Verbose".
Hope that helps!