French AI startup Mistral, founded in 2023, has announced the release of its new “vibe coding” client, Mistral Code, entering a competitive landscape currently occupied by solutions such as Windsurf, Anysphere’s Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Mistral Code, which is a fork of the open source project Continue, is designed as an AI-powered coding assistant that consolidates Mistral’s proprietary models, an integrated development environment (IDE) assistant, local deployment capabilities, and various enterprise tools into a single platform.
As of Wednesday, June 4, 2025, a private beta of Mistral Code is accessible for users leveraging JetBrains development platforms and Microsoft’s VS Code. According to a blog post provided to TechCrunch by the company, Mistral’s objective with this release is straightforward: to furnish enterprise developers with top-tier coding models. These models are intended to facilitate a range of functions, from immediate code completions to complex multi-step refactoring processes, all through an integrated platform that offers flexible deployment options, including cloud, reserved capacity, and air-gapped on-premises GPU configurations.
The adoption of AI programming assistants is experiencing significant growth within the development community. While these tools are still evolving and face challenges in producing high-quality software consistently, their potential to substantially increase coding productivity is driving rapid adoption by both companies and individual developers. A recent survey highlighted this trend, indicating that 76% of developers had either used or were planning to incorporate AI tools into their development workflows within the previous year.
Mistral Code operates on a combination of the company’s internally developed models. These include Codestral, specifically designed for code autocomplete functionalities; Codestral Embed, utilized for sophisticated code search and retrieval tasks; Devstral, intended for “agentic” coding assignments that require autonomous action; and Mistral Medium, which powers the chat assistance features. The client supports more than 80 programming languages and is compatible with a variety of third-party plug-ins. Furthermore, the company notes that Mistral Code possesses the capability to reason over various development artifacts, such as files, terminal outputs, and issues.
Leading organizations are reportedly already deploying Mistral Code in production environments. These include prominent firms like the consulting giant Capgemini, the Spanish and Portuguese banking institution Abanca, and the French national railway company SNCF. Mistral’s blog post further elucidates that customers have the flexibility to fine-tune or post-train the underlying models on their private repositories. They can also distill lightweight variants of these models to suit specific needs. For IT managers, Mistral Code provides a comprehensive admin console that offers granular platform controls, in-depth observability into usage, efficient seat management, and detailed usage analytics.
Mistral has communicated its intention to persistently enhance Mistral Code. The company also plans to contribute a portion of the improvements and upgrades developed for its client back to the Continue open source project, demonstrating a commitment to the wider development community.
