README.md

Steps

Steps are the composable unit of action in Continue. They define a run method which has access to the entire ContinueSDK, allowing you to take actions inside the IDE, call language models, and more. In this folder you can find a number of good examples.

How to write a step

a. Start by creating a subclass of Step

You should first consider what will be the parameters of your recipe. These are defined as attributes in the Pydantic class. For example, if you wanted a "filepath" attribute that would look like this:

class HelloWorldStep(Step):
    filepath: str
    ...

b. Next, write the run method

This method takes the ContinueSDK as a parameter, giving you all the tools you need to write your steps (if it's missing something, let us know, we'll add it!). You can write any code inside the run method; this is what will happen when your step is run, line for line. As an example, here's a step that will open a file and append "Hello World!":

class HelloWorldStep(Step):
    filepath: str

    async def run(self, sdk: ContinueSDK):
        await sdk.ide.setFileOpen(self.filepath)
        await sdk.append_to_file(self.filepath, "Hello World!")

c. Finally, every Step is displayed with a description of what it has done

If you'd like to override the default description of your step, which is just the class name, then implement the describe method. You can:

• Return a static string
• Store state in a class attribute (prepend with a double underscore, which signifies (through Pydantic) that this is not a parameter for the Step, just internal state) during the run method, and then grab this in the describe method.
• Use state in conjunction with the models parameter of the describe method to autogenerate a description with a language model. For example, if you'd used an attribute called __code_written to store a string representing some code that was written, you could implement describe as return models.medium.complete(f"{self.\_\_code_written}\n\nSummarize the changes made in the above code.").

Here's an example:

class HelloWorldStep(Step):
    filepath: str

    async def run(self, sdk: ContinueSDK):
        await sdk.ide.setFileOpen(self.filepath)
        await sdk.append_to_file(self.filepath, "Hello World!")

    def describe(self, models: Models):
        return f"Appended 'Hello World!'  to {self.filepath}"