French AI startup Mistral is releasing its own “vibe coding” client, Mistral Code, to compete with incumbents like Windsurf, Anysphere’s Cursor, and GitHub Copilot.
Mistral Code, a fork of the open source project Continue, is an AI-powered coding assistant that bundles Mistral’s models, an “in-IDE” assistant, local deployment options, and enterprise tools into a single package. A private beta is available as of Wednesday for JetBrains development platforms and Microsoft’s VS Code.
“Our goal with Mistral Code is simple: deliver best-in-class coding models to enterprise developers, enabling everything from instant completions to multi-step refactoring through an integrated platform deployable in the cloud, on reserved capacity, or air-gapped, on-prem GPUs,” Mistral wrote in a blog post provided to TechCrunch.
AI programming assistants are growing increasingly popular. While they still struggle to code quality software, their promise to boost coding productivity is pushing companies and developers to adopt them rapidly. One recent poll found that 76% of developers have used or were planning to use AI tools in their development processes last year.
Mistral Code is said to be powered by a combination of in-house models including Codestral (for code autocomplete), Codestral Embed (for code search and retrieval), Devstral (for “agentic” coding tasks), and Mistral Medium (for chat assistance). The client supports more than 80 programming languages and a number of third-party plug-ins, and can reason over things like files, terminal outputs, and issues, the company said.
Mistral claimed that customers including consulting firm Capgemini, Spanish and Portuguese bank Abanca, and French national railway company SNCF are using Mistral Code in production.
“Customers can fine-tune or post-train the underlying models on private repositories or distill lightweight variants,” Mistral explained in its blog post. “For IT managers, a rich admin console exposes granular platform controls, deep observability, seat management, and usage analytics.”
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Mistral said it plans to continue making improvements to Mistral Code and contribute at least a portion of those upgrades to the Continue open source project.
Founded in 2023, Mistral is a frontier model lab building a range of AI-powered services, including a chatbot platform, Le Chat, and mobile apps. It is backed by venture investors like General Catalyst, and has raised over €1.1 billion (roughly $1.24 billion) to date.
A few weeks ago, Mistral launched the aforementioned Codestral, Devstral, and Mistral Medium models. Around the same time, the company rolled out Le Chat Enterprise, a corporate-focused chatbot service that offers tools like an AI agent builder, and integrates Mistral’s models with third-party services like Gmail, Google Drive, and SharePoint.
