French AI startup Mistral<\/a> is releasing its own \u201cvibe coding\u201d client, Mistral Code, to compete with incumbents like Windsurf, Anysphere\u2019s Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. <\/p>\n Mistral Code, a fork of the open source project Continue, is an AI-powered coding assistant that bundles Mistral\u2019s models, an \u201cin-IDE\u201d 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\u2019s VS Code. <\/p>\n \u201cOur 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,\u201d Mistral wrote in a blog post provided to TechCrunch. <\/p>\n AI programming assistants are growing increasingly popular. While they still struggle to code<\/a> quality<\/a> software<\/a>, their promise to boost coding productivity is pushing companies and developers to rapidly adopt them.\u00a0One recent poll<\/a>\u00a0found that 76% of devs used or were planning to use AI tools in their development processes last year.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cagentic\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cCustomers can fine-tune or post-train the underlying models on private repositories or distill lightweight variants,\u201d Mistral explains in its blog post. \u201cFor IT managers, a rich admin console exposes granular platform controls, deep observability, seat management, and usage analytics.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s backed by VCs like General Catalyst, and has raised over \u20ac1.1 billion (roughly $1.24 billion) to date. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s models with third-party services like Gmail, Google Drive, and SharePoint.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Mistral](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/unnamed-16.png?w=680\")