Comment by jnurmine

3 days ago

I use Claude with Kiro at work and at home Mistral stuff with pro subscription for coding and research. I don't see a fundamental difference between them in results, at least with what I use them for. The cost is lower too, but it is not the only reason why I won't use Claude at home.

Vibe (the CLI Kiro-like tool) feels more "Claude-ish" as it has more terse answers, while the Le Chat can get quite chatty if you really push it ( * ). Prompting it right gets Le Chat more focused and back to being terse.

( * ) Le Chat is by default in "Fast" mode. It also has "Think" and "Research", but I've not felt the need to use those yet.

As a practical example:

I'm doing some on-and-off family research when I can and have some time since it's the rabbit-holest of all rabbit-holes.

I already knew the answers, but decided to test how well Le Chat does. I fed a 208 year old church book page to Le Chat and asked if it can read that handwritten old cursive Swedish and tell me the contents. Le Chat had a look and then explained it could not, but it pointed me to something I had completely missed before, despite having looked for it: The Swedish Lion OCR model by Riksarkivet (Swedish National Archives) which is purpose-built for OCRing such records (the tool by READ-COOP including The Swedish Lion is at http://www.transkribus.org/).

Then, Transkribus confirmed my existing information and confirmed that I can kind of sort of read that cursive too. I did not expect any new findings here, just to verify against known facts and things were OK. The tip to Transkribus was very nice and I'll be using that tool more.

After this, I asked if Le Chat could dig up some more information about the person (it's a Swedish-Russian noble family connection so a lot of written material exists). Le Chat went about it, summarized real web pages, and the information matched with what I knew already, which was good, no hallucinations or such. I prompted Le Chat further towards the parents and grandparents and so on, it kept on replying with factual summaries and references to web pages that actually exist.

This was all in all very good. For what I earlier spent perhaps a weekend or two (taking like two weeks of wall clock time) in total, I could dig up basically the same information, with sources referenced, in a fraction of the time. Even if Le Chat could not read the page, it pointed to Transkribus and that was very helpful.

The point is: Mistral performs well for me and I see no reason to use something else. There's also the option to turn off the "use my inputs to learn the model". I don't know if Claude has it or not.