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 tooling 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 rapidly adopt them. One recent poll found that 76% of devs used or were planning to use AI tools in their development processes last year.
According to Mistral, Mistral Code is 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 plugins, and can reason over things like files, terminal outputs, and issues, Mistral says.
Mistral claims 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 explains in its blog post. “For IT managers, a rich admin console exposes granular platform controls, deep observability, seat management, and usage analytics.”
Mistral says that, going forward, it plans to continue making improvements to Mistral Code and contribute a least a portion of those upgrades to the Continue open source project.
Founded in 2023, Mistral is a frontier model lab aiming to build a range of AI-powered services including a chatbot platform, Le Chat, and mobile apps. It’s backed by VCs like General Catalyst, and has raised over €1.1 billion (roughly $1.24 billion) to date.
