PART 4 OF 5: The Privacy-First Local AI Tools
5 Free AI Code Assistants – Tools That Auto-Complete, Refactor & Debug Your Code
Not everyone wants their code sitting on someone else's server. Whether it's company policy, client confidentiality, or you just don't love the idea of your codebase training someone's model — this part is for you.
These tools run locally or give you full control over your data. And yes, they're still free.
16.Ollama + Continue.dev
This combo is the ultimate free local AI setup. Ollama lets you run open-source models like CodeLlama, DeepSeek Coder, or Mistral right on your own machine. Pair it with Continue.dev in VS Code and you have a fully offline AI code assistant that rivals paid tools. Your code never leaves your computer. Full stop.
Using Continue with ollama guide
17.LM Studio
LM Studio gives you a beautiful desktop app to download and run AI models locally. It has a built-in chat interface and an OpenAI-compatible local server, which means you can connect it to tools like Continue or any app that supports custom API endpoints. Great for non-technical setup. Just click, download a model, and go.
18.Tabby (Open Source)
Tabby is a self-hosted AI coding assistant. You deploy it on your own machine or server and it gives you GitHub Copilot-style completions without any data leaving your environment. It supports VS Code and JetBrains and has a clean dashboard to monitor usage. A little more setup involved but totally worth it for teams with privacy requirements.
19.FauxPilot
This is an open-source, self-hosted alternative to GitHub Copilot. It uses the same API format as Copilot, which means it drops right into editors that already support Copilot. You run it on your own hardware, pick your own model, and get real-time completions with zero cloud dependency. Requires a decent GPU to run smoothly.
20.CodeGeeX (Free)
CodeGeeX is an open-source multilingual code generation tool developed by Tsinghua University. It runs locally, supports over 100 programming languages, and has a VS Code plugin that's easy to set up. It's not as well-known in the Western dev community but the code quality is solid and the privacy story is clean.
Part 4 wrapped! Last one coming up. Part 5 covers the most exciting new wave of AI coding tools that are just starting to gain traction. These are the ones to watch in 2025 and beyond.
Top comments (0)