Connecting Codestral with VS Code

These days AI hype is so high that I though I also should test some tools I can use to increase my productivity. That's when I came across Codestral by Mistral AI. 

Codestral is a coding assistant tool which can be integrated to your development environment and best of all is, it is free.

So I have tested whether I can integrate Codestral with VS Code. Here is what I experienced.

Step 1 - Create a Mistral AI account. Don't worry it is free (as of now).

Step 2 - Enable Codestral. Codestral is like part of Mistral AI (like a module), but it need activate separately.

Step 3 - Open VS Code and install "Continue" extension. Continue extension is use to integrate VS code and Codestral. This extension can be use to integrate VS Code with other AI Code assistance as well. But we here looking into how we can integrate with Codestral.

Once installed it will appear on left side bar in VS Code.

You can move it to right side, so it will not cover your file explorer and other important sections. But it totally up to you.

Step 4 - Generate API key. Go to Mistral AI website again and go to Codestral section and click on the Generate API button to generate a API key.

Step 5 - Add Codestral to continue extension. Click on the models drop down and click on add chat model.

Then select "Mistral" as the provider and "Codestral" as the model. Enter the API key you have generated before in the box provided. Finally click Connect.

That's it, now you have connected with your Codstral account in VS code.

In next article we see basic usage of the Codestral in VS code.