GitHub - mistralai/mistral-vibe: Minimal CLI coding agent by Mistral

7 min read Original article ↗

Mistral Vibe

PyPI Version Python Version CI Status License

██████████████████░░
██████████████████░░
████  ██████  ████░░
████    ██    ████░░
████          ████░░
████  ██  ██  ████░░
██      ██      ██░░
██████████████████░░
██████████████████░░

Mistral's open-source CLI coding assistant.

Mistral Vibe is a command-line coding assistant powered by Mistral's models. It provides a conversational interface to your codebase, allowing you to use natural language to explore, modify, and interact with your projects through a powerful set of tools.

Warning

Mistral Vibe works on Windows, but we officially support and target UNIX environments.

One-line install (recommended)

Linux and macOS

curl -LsSf https://mistral.ai/vibe/install.sh | bash

Windows

First, install uv

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

Then, use uv command below.

Using uv

uv tool install mistral-vibe

Using pip

Features

  • Interactive Chat: A conversational AI agent that understands your requests and breaks down complex tasks.
  • Powerful Toolset: A suite of tools for file manipulation, code searching, version control, and command execution, right from the chat prompt.
    • Read, write, and patch files (read_file, write_file, search_replace).
    • Execute shell commands in a stateful terminal (bash).
    • Recursively search code with grep (with ripgrep support).
    • Manage a todo list to track the agent's work.
  • Project-Aware Context: Vibe automatically scans your project's file structure and Git status to provide relevant context to the agent, improving its understanding of your codebase.
  • Advanced CLI Experience: Built with modern libraries for a smooth and efficient workflow.
    • Autocompletion for slash commands (/) and file paths (@).
    • Persistent command history.
    • Beautiful Themes.
  • Highly Configurable: Customize models, providers, tool permissions, and UI preferences through a simple config.toml file.
  • Safety First: Features tool execution approval.

Quick Start

  1. Navigate to your project's root directory:

  2. Run Vibe:

  3. If this is your first time running Vibe, it will:

    • Create a default configuration file at ~/.vibe/config.toml
    • Prompt you to enter your API key if it's not already configured
    • Save your API key to ~/.vibe/.env for future use

  4. Start interacting with the agent!

    > Can you find all instances of the word "TODO" in the project?

🤖 The user wants to find all instances of "TODO". The `grep` tool is perfect for this. I will use it to search the current directory.

> grep(pattern="TODO", path=".")

... (grep tool output) ...

🤖 I found the following "TODO" comments in your project.

Usage

Interactive Mode

Simply run vibe to enter the interactive chat loop.

  • Multi-line Input: Press Ctrl+J or Shift+Enter for select terminals to insert a newline.
  • File Paths: Reference files in your prompt using the @ symbol for smart autocompletion (e.g., > Read the file @src/agent.py).
  • Shell Commands: Prefix any command with ! to execute it directly in your shell, bypassing the agent (e.g., > !ls -l).

You can start Vibe with a prompt with the following command:

vibe "Refactor the main function in cli/main.py to be more modular."

Note: The --auto-approve flag automatically approves all tool executions without prompting. In interactive mode, you can also toggle auto-approve on/off using Shift+Tab.

Programmatic Mode

You can run Vibe non-interactively by piping input or using the --prompt flag. This is useful for scripting.

vibe --prompt "Refactor the main function in cli/main.py to be more modular."

by default it will use auto-approve mode.

Slash Commands

Use slash commands for meta-actions and configuration changes during a session.

Configuration

Vibe is configured via a config.toml file. It looks for this file first in ./.vibe/config.toml and then falls back to ~/.vibe/config.toml.

API Key Configuration

Vibe supports multiple ways to configure your API keys:

  1. Interactive Setup (Recommended for first-time users): When you run Vibe for the first time or if your API key is missing, Vibe will prompt you to enter it. The key will be securely saved to ~/.vibe/.env for future sessions.

  2. Environment Variables: Set your API key as an environment variable:

    export MISTRAL_API_KEY="your_mistral_api_key"

  3. .env File: Create a .env file in ~/.vibe/ and add your API keys:

    MISTRAL_API_KEY=your_mistral_api_key

    Vibe automatically loads API keys from ~/.vibe/.env on startup. Environment variables take precedence over the .env file if both are set.

Note: The .env file is specifically for API keys and other provider credentials. General Vibe configuration should be done in config.toml.

Custom System Prompts

You can create custom system prompts to replace the default one (prompts/cli.md). Create a markdown file in the ~/.vibe/prompts/ directory with your custom prompt content.

To use a custom system prompt, set the system_prompt_id in your configuration to match the filename (without the .md extension):

# Use a custom system prompt
system_prompt_id = "my_custom_prompt"

This will load the prompt from ~/.vibe/prompts/my_custom_prompt.md.

Custom Agent Configurations

You can create custom agent configurations for specific use cases (e.g., red-teaming, specialized tasks) by adding agent-specific TOML files in the ~/.vibe/agents/ directory.

To use a custom agent, run Vibe with the --agent flag:

vibe --agent my_custom_agent

Vibe will look for a file named my_custom_agent.toml in the agents directory and apply its configuration.

Example custom agent configuration (~/.vibe/agents/redteam.toml):

# Custom agent configuration for red-teaming
active_model = "devstral-2"
system_prompt_id = "redteam"

# Disable some tools for this agent
disabled_tools = ["search_replace", "write_file"]

# Override tool permissions for this agent
[tools.bash]
permission = "always"

[tools.read_file]
permission = "always"

Note: this implies that you have setup a redteam prompt names ~/.vibe/prompts/redteam.md

MCP Server Configuration

You can configure MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to extend Vibe's capabilities. Add MCP server configurations under the mcp_servers section:

# Example MCP server configurations
[[mcp_servers]]
name = "my_http_server"
transport = "http"
url = "http://localhost:8000"
headers = { "Authorization" = "Bearer my_token" }
api_key_env = "MY_API_KEY_ENV_VAR"
api_key_header = "Authorization"
api_key_format = "Bearer {token}"

[[mcp_servers]]
name = "my_streamable_server"
transport = "streamable-http"
url = "http://localhost:8001"
headers = { "X-API-Key" = "my_api_key" }

[[mcp_servers]]
name = "fetch_server"
transport = "stdio"
command = "uvx"
args = ["mcp-server-fetch"]

Supported transports:

  • http: Standard HTTP transport
  • streamable-http: HTTP transport with streaming support
  • stdio: Standard input/output transport (for local processes)

Key fields:

  • name: A short alias for the server (used in tool names)
  • transport: The transport type
  • url: Base URL for HTTP transports
  • headers: Additional HTTP headers
  • api_key_env: Environment variable containing the API key
  • command: Command to run for stdio transport
  • args: Additional arguments for stdio transport

MCP tools are named using the pattern {server_name}_{tool_name} and can be configured with permissions like built-in tools:

# Configure permissions for specific MCP tools
[tools.fetch_server_get]
permission = "always"

[tools.my_http_server_query]
permission = "ask"

Enable/disable tools with patterns

You can control which tools are active using enabled_tools and disabled_tools. These fields support exact names, glob patterns, and regular expressions.

Examples:

# Only enable tools that start with "serena_" (glob)
enabled_tools = ["serena_*"]

# Regex (prefix with re:) — matches full tool name (case-insensitive)
enabled_tools = ["re:^serena_.*$"]

# Heuristic regex support (patterns like `serena.*` are treated as regex)
enabled_tools = ["serena.*"]

# Disable a group with glob; everything else stays enabled
disabled_tools = ["mcp_*", "grep"]

Notes:

  • MCP tool names use underscores, e.g., serena_list not serena.list.
  • Regex patterns are matched against the full tool name using fullmatch.

Custom Vibe Home Directory

By default, Vibe stores its configuration in ~/.vibe/. You can override this by setting the VIBE_HOME environment variable:

export VIBE_HOME="/path/to/custom/vibe/home"

This affects where Vibe looks for:

  • config.toml - Main configuration
  • .env - API keys
  • agents/ - Custom agent configurations
  • prompts/ - Custom system prompts
  • tools/ - Custom tools
  • logs/ - Session logsRetryTo run code, enable code execution and file creation in Settings > Capabilities.

Editors/IDEs

Mistral Vibe can be used in text editors and IDEs that support Agent Client Protocol. See the ACP Setup documentation for setup instructions for various editors and IDEs.

Resources

License

Copyright 2025 Mistral AI

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the LICENSE file for the full license text.