how to get a free, private AI coding assistant in VS Code — no Copilot subscription, no cloud

Point your editor at a model on your own machine and get autocomplete, chat, and even an agent that edits files — free, unlimited, and with your… Aliteq Lena Fischer · AI & Local Compute Editor

Stack: Ollama + a VS Code extension — fully open, your code stays local.

Continue.dev — the best configurable autocomplete + chat inside VS Code.

Cline — an agent (like Cursor's agent mode): reads files, edits, runs commands, iterates. Apache 2.0.

Aider — the best terminal-based option if you prefer the command line.

Local models via Ollama: Qwen3-Coder, DeepSeek-Coder, Codestral, or Llama — zero ongoing cost.

Why: free, no usage cap, and your code never touches a cloud — huge for proprietary work.

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