Developers seeking GitHub Copilot-level code assistance without sending proprietary code to third-party servers now have a local alternative that handles completions, chat-based generation, and refactoring. A local AI coding assistant built on VS Code, Ollama, and the Continue extension delivers inline completions, chat-based generation, and contextual code explanations, all run on your own hardware. The toolchain has shipped stable releases throughout 2025, with models like Qwen2.5-Coder and DeepSeek Coder V2 closing in on cloud-hosted options for single-function generation and everyday programming tasks. How to Set Up a Local AI Coding Assistant Install Ollama on your machine using Homebrew, the install script, or the Windows installer. Pull coding models ( qwen2.5-coder:7b for chat, qwen2.5-coder:1.5b for autocomplete). Verify the Ollama API is running by hitting http://localhost:11434 . Install the Continue extension in VS Code from the marketplace.…