In response to the <a href="http://dev.to" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">dev.to</a> post on <a href="https://dly.to/EL6VHm91ijG" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Nine open source projects to watch in 2026</a>
We’ve been using the <a href="https://hub.continue.dev/continuedev/vscode" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Continue</a> plugin in VSCode / VSCodium for over a year now, with Ollama, and had great results. Also, we use <a href="https://roocode.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">RooCode</a> as a complimentary full agentic alternative for scaffolding and boilerplate. Good models are <a href="https://ollama.com/mychen76/qwen2.5_cline_roocode:32b" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">mychen76/qwen2.5_cline_roocode:32b</a> and <a href="https://ollama.com/mychen76/qwen3_cline_roocode:30b" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">mychen76/qwen3_cline_roocode:30b</a>. Use the <a href="https://github.com/upstash/context7" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">context7</a> and <a href="https://github.com/brave/brave-search-mcp-server" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Brave Search API</a> MCP servers to keep your LLMs knowledge current past the cutoff date.
<pre><code class="language-text">Best reason ever to get your boss to buy you a dev laptop with 12+ GB VRAM. Argue security, privacy, or IP protection. 
</code></pre>
While you’re at it, if you’re an in-house dev team, consider moving to self-hosted <a href="https://docs.gitea.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Gitea</a>. It has support for GitHub Actions, and package management for Cargo, Chef, Composer, Conan, Conda, Container, Helm, Maven, npm, NuGet, Pub, PyPI, RubyGems, and Vagrant. Basically, store everything on premise.
Turso looks interesting as an alternative to <a href="https://rqlite.io/docs/faq/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">rqlite</a>. rqlite is a stable 10 year old project that puts a Golang wrapper on core sqlite as opposed to a rewrite. (Rust is all the sexy now, ehh?). I’m curious to hear about anyone’s experience comparing the two.

theacademe

A developer shares their experience with AI coding assistants, recommending Continue plugin with Ollama for VSCode, RooCode for scaffolding, and specific Qwen models. They suggest using MCP servers to keep LLMs current, advocate for self-hosted Gitea as a GitHub alternative with package management support, and compare Turso with rqlite as SQLite-based distributed databases.

Thoughts on "Nine open source projects to watch in 2026"

I run my own Gitea since almost 10 years and am proud of it.