French AI startup Mistral is releasing its own “vibe coding” client, Mistral Code, to compete with incumbents such as Windsurf, Anysphere’s Cursor and Github Copilot.
Mistral Code, a fork of Open Source Project Continue, is an AI-powered coding assistant that bundles Mistral’s models, “India” assistants, local deployment options, and enterprise tools into a single package. As of Wednesday, private betas will be available on the JetBrains development platform and Microsoft’s VS code.
“The goal of Mistral Code is simple. We deliver best-in-class coding models to enterprise developers for class completion, integrated platforms, booking capabilities, or air-gapped on-prem GPUs, making everything possible, from instant completion to multi-step refactoring.”
AI programming assistants are becoming more and more popular. They still struggle to code high quality software, but their promise to increase coding productivity encourages businesses and developers to adopt them quickly. A recent poll found that 76% of developers either use or plan to use AI tools in the development process last year.
According to Mistral, mistral code is driven by a combination of internal models including Codestral (for code autocomplete), Codestral Embed (for code search and search), Devstral (for “agent” coding tasks), and Mistral Medium (for chat assistance). Clients support over 80 programming languages and many third-party plugins, allowing them to infer files, terminal output, problems, etc., says Mistral.
Mistral claims that customers, including consulting firm Capgemini, Spanish and Portuguese bank Avanca and French National Railway Company SNCF, are using mistral codes in production.
“Customers can tweak or post-train the underlying models of private repositories, or distill lightweight variations,” explains Mistral in a blog post. “For IT Managers, the rich management console exposes granular platform control, deep observability, seating management, and usage analytics.”
Mistral says it will continue to improve its Mistral Code in the future, and will contribute at least some of these upgrades to open source projects.
Founded in 2023, Mistral is a frontier model lab aimed at building services powered by a variety of AI, including chatbot platforms, LE chat, and mobile apps. It is backed by VCSs like General Catalyst, and has raised more than 1.1 billion euros (approximately $1.24 billion) to date.
A few weeks ago, Mistral launched the aforementioned Codestral, Devastral and Mistral Media models. At about the same time, the company deployed Le Chat Enterprise, a company-centric chatbot service that provides tools such as AI agent builders and integrates Mistral’s model with third-party services such as Gmail, Google Drive, and SharePoint.