Compare/Continue vs Craft Agents

AI tool comparison

Continue vs Craft Agents

Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.

C

Developer Tools

Continue

Open-source AI code assistant for VS Code and JetBrains

Ship

100%

Panel ship

Community

Free

Entry

Continue is an open-source IDE extension that adds AI chat, autocomplete, and editing to VS Code and JetBrains. Connect any LLM — local or cloud. Customizable with your own prompts and context.

C

Developer Tools

Craft Agents

Open-source desktop app for multi-session Claude agents with MCP & APIs

Ship

75%

Panel ship

Community

Free

Entry

Craft Agents OSS is an open-source desktop application built on Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK, offering a polished GUI for managing multiple AI agent sessions simultaneously. Built by Luki Labs and released under Apache 2.0, it fills the gap between raw API access and the full Claude.ai web interface — giving developers and power users a native desktop experience with serious capability depth. The app supports three permission modes that make it genuinely useful for real work: Explore (read-only, safe for exploring codebases), Ask to Edit (approval-based, for supervised automation), and Auto (unrestricted, for trusted workflows). It connects to MCP servers, REST APIs from Google, Slack, and Microsoft, and local filesystems, with real-time streaming responses and full tool call visualization. A multi-session workflow with Todo → In Progress → Needs Review → Done status tracking makes it feel more like a project management system than a chat interface. Built on Electron + React with encrypted credential storage and a headless server mode, Craft Agents is architecturally serious. It's available as a one-line installer for macOS, Linux, and Windows. With the Claude Agent SDK gaining traction, this is the first polished desktop client that treats agents as long-running workflows rather than single-turn conversations.

Decision
Continue
Craft Agents
Panel verdict
Ship · 3 ship / 0 skip
Ship · 3 ship / 1 skip
Community
No community votes yet
No community votes yet
Pricing
Free (open-source)
Open Source / Free (Apache 2.0)
Best for
Open-source AI code assistant for VS Code and JetBrains
Open-source desktop app for multi-session Claude agents with MCP & APIs
Category
Developer Tools
Developer Tools

Reviewer scorecard

Futurist
80/100 · ship

This is the kind of tool that makes you wonder how you worked without it.

80/100 · ship

Agent session management as a first-class concept is where the whole category is heading. Craft Agents is early proof that the IDE model — multi-session, persistent, project-aware — is the right UX paradigm for AI agents, not the chat-box model we inherited from GPT-3 days.

Skeptic
80/100 · ship

Solid execution. Does what it promises and the DX is clean.

45/100 · skip

Electron desktop apps for AI agents have a graveyard of predecessors — most people end up in the terminal or the browser anyway. The Claude-only model dependency is also a real limitation; when Anthropic changes their SDK or pricing, the whole platform needs to adapt.

Builder
80/100 · ship

The team ships fast and responds to feedback. Good sign.

80/100 · ship

The three permission modes — Explore, Ask to Edit, Auto — is the right model for how I actually use agents. I want read-only exploration when I'm learning a codebase and auto mode when I'm in flow. That plus MCP server support makes this my new default agent UI.

Creator
No panel take
80/100 · ship

File attachments with automatic format conversion plus the Slack/Google API integrations mean I can finally have agents that work across my whole toolkit, not just the terminal. The one-line installer is the detail that will make this actually get adopted.

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Continue vs Craft Agents: Which AI Tool Should You Ship? — Ship or Skip