ENGINEERING

VS Code on your own gateway: the editor everyone already has

August 2026 · 4 min read

Why this is the cheapest AI rollout you will ever do

Cursor is excellent, but it is a new editor to install, learn and pay for. VS Code is already on every machine in the company. Adding an open-source extension and pointing it at your own gateway gives the whole team an AI assistant on sovereign infrastructure, with zero migration and zero new licenses.

Step 1: Install Continue

In VS Code: Extensions (Ctrl+Shift+X) → search Continue → Install. It is open source, so nothing here depends on a vendor's roadmap.

Step 2: Point it at your gateway

Open the Continue config (command palette: Continue: Open config.json) and replace the models block. This is the entire integration:

{
  "models": [
    {
      "title": "iSol 4.9",
      "provider": "openai",
      "model": "isol-4.9",
      "apiBase": "https://tokens.4clouders.com/v1",
      "apiKey": "sk-your-gateway-key"
    }
  ],
  "tabAutocompleteModel": {
    "title": "iSol 4.9",
    "provider": "openai",
    "model": "isol-4.9",
    "apiBase": "https://tokens.4clouders.com/v1",
    "apiKey": "sk-your-gateway-key"
  }
}

"provider": "openai" plus apiBase is what makes it work: Continue speaks the OpenAI standard and your gateway answers it. Save the file and the model appears in the Continue sidebar immediately, no restart.

Step 3: The request it makes, answered live

Every chat and every inline edit becomes exactly this call. Here it is against our gateway, with a real refactor request:

Gotchas worth knowing

• Set tabAutocompleteModel too, or inline completion keeps calling whatever was configured before.
• One key per developer. The gateway ledger then reads as a cost report by person, not one anonymous total.
• Cline works the same way if your team prefers it: same OpenAI-compatible provider, same base URL.

Step 4: Verify at the gateway, not at the client

Whatever the tool's screen says, the source of truth is the key's ledger. Every request lands there with model and token counts, so if nothing shows up, the change did not take:

curl -s https://tokens.4clouders.com/key/info \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk-your-gateway-key" | jq .info.spend

Every command and screenshot on this page comes from a session run against the live iSol gateway on 2026-08-22.

Try it on ours

Our gateway (iSol API) runs exactly this setup on sovereign infrastructure, US$ 99/month, 14-day trial.

See plans →