Mistral Code
mistral.ai
mistral.ai
Source: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mistrala...
Link destination: https://www.continue.dev/
Enterprise deals are usually around compliance and security primarily. Companies want centralized billing and to be sure that their developers only use "sanctioned" AI and other tech.
Who knows though with that contact us sales wall.
I do have access to US models via Kagi to play around with and use for things Mistral doesn't work on. I've been meaning to try command a too, but haven't gotten around to it. I will say that the new mistral medium model is surprisingly good, though I've only just started using it. Codestral is definitely behind other models.
I wouldnt use an AI LLM that has 50% of chance of me needing to reprompt or try another model, I prefer using direclty the best model directly. But yeah US vs. Europe is a real concern
Strikes me as a weird combo to have a fork of a VS Code/JetBrains extension be a completely walled off enterprise only deal. Any other apps out there having success with this sort of model?
For years, ollama didn't acknowledge llama.cpp and r/localllama found it weird until they finally mentioned llama.cpp on their page, but the damage is done: most apps that support local LLMs only support ollama or LM Studio API, not the original llama.cpp.
i'm a bald head grey beard, at least in the 90's when we shared software it was for the reasons we outlined, there was no github stars, there was no trying to line a job. it was a true gift and pay it forward sort of thing to the world. it's been almost lost due to money, if you need to earn a living, start a business, get a job and make your open source project a hobby. don't mix them together.
With all due respect, that's not how most open source software is today [1]. A lot of CS students on the job market need Github stars or green tiles in case the employers check their page. So many open source projects are done only to boost resumes, not for the reasons you mentioned. Not to mention a lot of projects start as open source to lure users, only to become closed at some point (the notorious langchain is one example).
[1]: with the exception of some huge projects like ffmpeg, llama.cpp, etc.
Then I would submit that you are picking the wrong license. The whole point of the GPL/AGPL family of licenses is to ensure that they can't just do this. They will be required to publish their changes, which benefits the original project (you). It's not a perfect solution, but it helps a great deal. The answer to this problem is not to close up and/or go proprietary.
https://www.tldrlegal.com/license/mozilla-public-license-2-0...
If you are using a copyleft license, especially AGPL, you may not get paid either, but you may get valuable contributions in return. It is also a good way to avoid having big companies profit from your work, if that's what you want.
If you want to make money but still want to open source, use a non-free "source available" licence (ex: "non-commercial"). They tend to be unpopular in the open source community and it is probably not the best way to get known.
And then you can have dual-licences, like GPL + commercial. Qt is probably the most popular software using that scheme.
But I don't really understand the people who publish software under a permissive licences and get forked by some tech giant and complain. That's what permissive licenses are for!
That being said, I highly value having access to the source code, even under a restrictive license. The source code is the best documentation, it doesn't lie. Also being able to make small changes, recompile with different libraries, etc... but for me, the "documentation" aspect is the most important. I don't do security, but I guess being able to audit the code is a good thing too.
For me, open source goes beyond the "freedom" aspect. Also, AFAIK, most commercial game engines are "source available" too.
Other nice thing about BSL is it converts to an Open Source license after 3-4 years which addresses the concern “what if the software vendor goes out of business”. You can support it yourself or another vendor can pick it up and support it after that time period.
They want to have their cake and eat it.
The code would be, but I'm not sure that's much of a barrier.
- If your primary goal is to release open software that stays open, then release under a copyleft license (GPL)
- If your primary goal is to release software for no-strings-attached use (including incorporation into commercial services) then use a permissive license (MIT, BSD, etc.)
I hope this is just a huge mistake that they aren't allowing anyone to actually try it.
Word of mouth from HN and others (not just advertising a link or press release) is how I've started to use about pretty much every single AI feature I use.
Assuming this isn't a mistake, it says that this company has the wrong management/leadership structure if they think they can sell a brand new developer focused coding tool without letting actual developers try it. Maybe we don't know something?
The thing is, every random person being able to use an LLM or related app for free (or even a fixed, amount like a $20/month subscription) is basically the company behind it saying "please spend our money". That might work if you raised tons and tons of cash, but if I recall Mistral has raised ~$1B compared to OpenAI's $60B. That gives them good incentive to prioritize making money over being the hype tool that you can easily try. User-led adoption isn't the only strategy out there.
As for it being a fork of Continue, they acknowledge that very much in their blog post that announced this. Sure, it probably means you could set up an equivalent yourself with Continue pointing to the right model; but that adds a lots of friction – and might not be allowed in an entreprise setting.
--
Here's a FAQ for Mistral Code: https://help.mistral.ai/en/collections/732571-mistral-code
For example: https://help.mistral.ai/en/articles/333875-do-i-need-an-acti...
> Do I need an active subscription to use Mistral Code?
> At the moment, Mistral Code is a premium feature only avaible to Enterprise customers.
> This means that to activate and use Mistral Code, your organization needs to have an active Enterprise agreement with Mistral AI that includes access to this tool.
> Individual users within such organizations can then log in on their own and use the extension autonomously, provided they've been attributed a Mistral Code seat by their organization's administrator (see How to manage Mistral Code seats for more details).
Here's the problem with AI company revenue, I want this to be local, Continue is open source, my company laptop is powerful enough to run a usefully sized LLM locally more or less just as fast, and there are plenty of open models available publicly (including by Mistral, latest dev related called devstral).
As hardware progresses and LLM efficiency increases, I really don't think LLM programming has any future doing remote execution unless maybe as a chatbot kind of experience, but definitely not in an IDE.
Putting together a good developer experience with the open-ish and free-ish things available is still an exercise in cobbling a bunch of things together, but it's going to be streamlined soon and finding a way to compete with "zero cost and local" is going to be very hard for AI businesses.
It’s like Mistral is choosing to fail here.
Edit: I can't even tell if its a CLI tool, an IDE plugin or a standalone IDE!
Edit 2: oh man! it's at the bottom of the page
Edit 3: "Mistral Code Enterprise is currently only available with an enterprise license." :D
I’m not personally a fan of “call us” pricing, but it is indeed effective, and the companies that sell software this way do so because they prioritize establishing human relationships between a salesperson and the buyer.
In the long run, this leads to more sales/upsells.
If you're too small, they won't even talk to you.
That's what besoke pricing is.
Knowing your client happens regardless of showing pricing or not.
> If you're too small, they won't even talk to you.
This is often true. Some of the software I worked on was extremely expensive to host, and there was indeed a minimum threshold that was many multiples of $10K.
It's not that the company didn't want smaller players to use the software, but that smaller players just weren't large enough to benefit from the minimum buy-in, and selling the software at a lower cost for those smaller customers would have just been pure loss. Over time, they were able to lower the minimum threshold due to improvements in the architecture and economies of scale, but the point here is just that these minimums often exist for good reasons.
> Knowing your client happens regardless of showing pricing or not.
It really does not. Many software companies have a minimal relationship (if any) with their customers. For some customers and some product types, this is perfectly fine. But when a company is buying software that will cost the company millions/year, having a direct line to a real person who in turn can arrange conversations with product management, customer success, etc. is table stakes, and is often not possible or available with smaller vendors.
You can dislike the model, but I'd suggest digging in to some of the why before dismissing it too reductively.
dismissals of negative reactions as 'cynical' rarely acknowledge the fact that a 'cynical' response is often no more cynical than the cynicism of the target.
bespoke pricing is a cynical tactic, no matter how you dress it up. it provides a legal shroud, and i've no more patience in me to give the benefit of the doubt to any profit-motivated enterprise that can't at least be upfront about what they want to charge for their services.
Again, speaking only for the places I worked, part of the reason pricing wasn't simple was that larger customer deployments were tuned to the customer based on a myriad of factors ranging from the specific software modules the customer purchased, use cases they intended to deploy and the load characteristics of those use cases, etc.
Setting aside for a moment any potential bad behavior, the bottom line is that for some kinds of software, bespoke pricing is a more accurate reflection of the reality of the deployment than trying to force some kind of standardized label on it. The places I worked also had pricing books they'd show customers, but due to their complexity, they would not publish these publicly.
> bespoke pricing is a cynical tactic, no matter how you dress it up
We'll have to agree to disagree. Having worked with quite a few large vendors over the years, there are clear and obvious differences between them, better and worse reasons for this type of pricing, and there's a reason that some companies have earned a negative reputation while others have not.
It's also not clear to me why you've concluded that this is all inherently cynical.
interacting with capital is a cynical act. capitalism is predatory but it's necessary to interact with it. if you're not cynical, you risk being taken for a worse ride than you have to be. this isn't me handwaving things; it's a fundamental aspect to how i see the world. cynicism doesn't have to be a simple doom-and-gloom "well, everything is bad, end of discussion" (regardless of my personal feelings about it) - it can be a tool to make sure you're able to interact with systems in ways that benefit you and others while retaining whatever modicum of control you can - because even if you aren't, your vendor is (or they're on their way to being out of business as a profit-motivated entity).
I'm trying to frame this sentence so it doesn't sound like a jab because that's not my intent, but based on what you've written, I don't think you understand the kind of software I'm describing.
In your mind, what is the distinction between the two, especially for an enterprise solution hosted by a vendor? In my experience, the two are often not so different at all, and the clean lines you imagine here are not lines that exist in practice. This will depend on the nature of the software, and the kind of support customers need (i.e. infrastructure vs. implementation).
> but it'd be nice if there was at least some upfront inkling of how much i have to open my organization's veins in exchange for a working implementation.
You are assuming this is not part of the model, but it is. Not publicly listing a pricing sheet does not in any way mean a customer doesn't have clarity about how much their deployment will cost before they sign a contract.
> interacting with capital is a cynical act.
Your use of "cynical" is in a different category than what I was describing above. If we go with your definition, there is no reason to differentiate between bespoke pricing and up-front published pricing.
Then, some companies wont give the slightest hint of pricing unless we talk to their paid salespeople. It's definitely a game to extract more money out of you. While they may or may not, they often ignore low-volume customers who could easily buy the product if it was on an online store. Your skepticism is warranted.
Setting aside any qualms about how the pricing is published, if a business chooses a strategy in which they focus on large customers and choose not to take on small customers, why is this an issue? Especially when the market is filled with alternatives?
The support model, predictability of yearly renewals, per-customer overhead, etc. look quite different when selling to larger customers vs. small/low-volume customers.
If about selfish gain, then you should have no concern with people calling out their practice to warn others. They're doing what they want to do. They're also helping others with a warning to avoid harms, like lock-in and overcharging, that are more likely with "call us for a quote" type companies. The warnings are also market signals for buyers.
In my case, I also tell people to encourage good practices like having prices up. Posts like mine might also inspire regulations that force prices to be shared ahead of time. They might also inspire people to use or develop lock-in-free alternatives which some out there are doing.
To make sure I understand your comment, are you saying that a company that sells a product with a $50K minimum buy-in — a number determined to be the threshold at which the company can recoup development costs and make a reasonable profit — is engaging in some kind of immoral behavior because it can only be purchased by larger companies?
> One kind would see it as discrimination with a negative, long-term impact on people and markets. Others would say they can do whatever they want.
This is quite the false dichotomy.
There are many valid reasons to sell to specific customer segments/markets that do not amount to “we’re doing it because we want to”.
In the early days of 3D printing, such hardware was prohibitively expensive and primarily sold to businesses. Even now, there are classes of 3D printer that cost many multiples of $10K. It would be strange to classify this as discrimination vs. acknowledging the realities of the market and the fact that it only makes sense target specific customer types depending on the product.
> They might also inspire people to use or develop lock-in-free alternatives which some out there are doing.
Lock-in is orthogonal to this pricing structure. It sounds like your primary issue is with companies that behave badly and use dark patterns. I share those concerns. But those issues are not inherent (or limited to) to “Call Us” pricing.
In fact, most AI suppliers ripped off other people to the tune of TB (copyright infringement), spent a lot on the training, and want to recover their costs only while denying content creators theirs. So, let's start with this being about massive infringement of something they sell to shift all value to themselves.
From there, they can sell only top dollar to enterprises or tiered amounts based on buyer income. The latter being discounts applied to a high, but reasonable, default price. Also, they can be open about this or call us for a quote.
There are companies that do the first. They often bundle features into Plus, Pro, or Enterprise deals to make those sells more straightforward. So, the AI suppliers could definitely do that. They dont have to but it would be good. Hence, me bringing it up where their employees read.
The other point creates asymmetric information between the seller snd the buyer in a way that only benefits the seller in a sellers' market. High-performance AI is probably a seller's market right now. Most writing on that says the asymmetry is bad for buyers by default. Also, goes badly for them more often than transparent pricing upfront. So, I call it out by default.
The only thing worse is if the terms of deals are kept secret. That enables and drags out abuses for longer. I cant find any pricing information on a lot of the AI offerings. That suggests they're doing that, too. If any NDA's on price or performance, stay away unless absolutely necessary.
I don't think "call us" is an effective inbound sales tactic though, but Mistral does have folks in sales who can do outbound sales.
The high touch approach ensures they're getting support at every step of the way and increases the chances that they'll use the software and renew later.
I'm not sure how many of these factors are in play for Mistral, but to your point, it's easy to imagine some scenarios.
Whether they're correct is a separate question, but it's an effective strategy if you're targeting that buyer.
"Contact Us" is a dealbreaker for a lot of orgs, but for the ones that are the real intended customers here it's not a huge impediment.
I seriously doubt Mistral was able to create something actually useful (or at least better than Aider/Claude Code/etc) and hiding behind enterprise sales is cowardly. Surely anyone with half a brain isn't going to roll the dice on something completely untested and coming from a company like Mistral. They have no track record in this area and their models aren't considered SOTA.
the evidence points to the empty half, then
https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2024/12/18/free-github-c...
Mistral needs to realize they don't stand a chance against AI giants that are giving out stuff for free or nearly free.
It's also a way to have some sort of lock in.
Tired to fake open source companies pulling the rug once they generate goodwill.
How is their underlying tech different from any other AI VSCode extension?
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mistrala...
Mistral Code is available with enterprise deployments.
Contact our team to get started.
0: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mistrala...
Seems they're purely targeting this towards enterprise