Yes, I did make a Mistral account. Forgot to mention that I tested all of the mentioned chatbots on free plans, except Copilot, which I had the highest tier plan for, as part of my job. Needless to say, even on the highest tier Copilot performed the worst. Congratulations, Microsoft.

I do appreciate Mistral being European and maintaining better values than American competition. That’s why I feel bad rating it so low. Although as you said, many tasks that LLMs are useful for don’t require the cutting edge at all.

In fact, Mistral Vibe (I preferred the name Le Chat, but oh well) is probably more than enough for most people. It’s just that availability of much better models makes it look worse than it is.

There’s also the question of system prompts. ChatGPT has been known to work considerably better with a good prompt setup, to the point where it’s not one of the worst chatbots anymore. I was only testing the defaults. It’s entirely possible that setting the right system prompt for Mistral improves it noticeably.

At the end of the day, however, if I can run a small, open-weight model locally with comparable results - using a huge, cloud-based and closed model makes no sense to me. I’m not connecting to any cloud unless I really need to.

Alibaba is releasing Qwen 3.8 27B in a little over 3 hours from now, so I’ll have to try that too. Though I’ll probably wait for fine-tuned community releases to make a more detailed comparison.

True, it’s always important to be careful with chatbots, even when used for simple tasks.

From my experience, they work fairly well when asked to explain code or error logs. For reference, I mainly tested Gemini and Deepseek. Apparently Claude is the best for coding, but I haven’t really tried it yet.

Personally I’d avoid both Mistral and Copilot. I used to work on Copilot, so unfortunately had a lot of exposure to it. Tried Mistral for a while too.

These two are the worst LLMs I’ve used so far. Honestly probably worse than local Qwen with 27-35B parameters. I feel a little bad hating on a European company, but unfortunately it’s way behind competition. At least from my testing.

If you really want to contribute to some projects, the first step would be to take a course in that project’s programming language. There are many decent free courses on YouTube, and even more fantastic courses for very cheap on websites like Udemy or Skillshare.

Next, you’d probably want to keep learning the language (e.g., by solving LeetCode challenges), read more about programming and software development in general, as well as check out another course or a tutorial about the specific frameworks/libraries or even just paradigms that the project works with.

A good starting point is FreeCodeCamp on YouTube. Courses there are excellent for the proce of 0€. If you have difficulties with anything - you can always ask a chatbot. If you opt for courses on something like Udemy - you can always just ask the instructor and they’ll usually respond within 2 hours, timezone permitting.