Intro to Roles

Models in Continue can be configured to be used for various roles in the extension.

• chat: Used for chat conversations in the extension sidebar
• autocomplete: Used for autocomplete code suggestions in the editor
• edit: Used to generate code based on edit prompts
• apply: Used to decide how to apply edits to a file
• embed: Used to generate embeddings used for vector search (@Codebase and @Docs context providers)
• rerank: Used to rerank results from vector search

These roles can be specified for a config.yaml model block using roles. See the YAML Specification for more details.

<Info> For recommendations on which models work best for each role, see our [comprehensive model recommendations](/customize/models#recommended-models). </Info>

Selecting model roles

You can control which of the models in your config for a given role will be currently used for that role. Above the main input, click the 3 dots and then the cube icon to expand the Models section. Then you can use the dropdowns to select an active model for each role.

<Info> `roles` are not explicitly defined within `config.json` (deprecated) - they are infered by the top level keys like `embeddingsProvider` </Info>