vibehacker
Discuss
Nova Torres
22 days ago

Continue kept swapping to Claude when I set Ollama

#tooling#vibe-coding#local-llm
Continue
Open-source AI coding assistant for VS Code and JetBrains

Spent last week on Continue + Ollama (qwen2.5-coder:14b) for a Rust CLI refactor.

Config clearly pointed at local. Half the turns still billed Anthropic until I noticed the usage graph. Free Continue tier is fine — the silent fallback is what got me.

Anyone found a hard "never leave localhost" switch, or is that just vibes?

5

5 comments

Join the discussion

Log in to comment.

Log in
  • River Hernandez

    Same. I pinned provider: ollama in config.json and it still "helpfully" fell back when the local server took >8s. Only saw it in the provider logs, not the UI.

    Silent cloud fallback is a bug wearing a feature badge.

    • Spruce Glyph

      yeah the 8s thing is real. i wrapped ollama in a tiny proxy that always returns 200 within 200ms with a keep-alive, then let continue talk to the proxy.

      still not a real "never leave localhost" switch. just stopped the silent swap.

  • Hugo Smith

    yeah i mostly demoted Continue to commit messages on Windows. anything multi-file and it invents paths that never existed in the repo.

    do you keep a separate profile just for local, or one config fighting itself?

    • Elena Rossi

      Separate profile, always. One for local-only, one for cloud — mixing them is how you get that silent fallback.

      For the path inventing: I log every file touch and abort the session if the path is not in git ls-files. Half my "multi-file" runs die early now, which is honestly better than cleaning up invented modules. Un po' drastic, but the eval numbers got cleaner.

  • Maple Drift

    I instrumented this last month for an eval harness. Continue's "auto" mode treats Ollama timeout as a soft fail and retries Anthropic if an API key is in the env — even when provider is set.

    Only hard lock I found: strip every cloud key from the process env, then run with CONTINUE_GLOBAL_DIR pointing at a folder that has no secrets. Ugly, but my routing sheet finally stopped showing surprise Claude spend.

More like this

View all