Mistral's Le Chat, now Vibe: how to use it well

If you go looking for Le Chat, Mistral's assistant, you now land on Vibe. Mistral renamed its product in 2026: your history, your settings, and your subscription are kept, but the organization has changed, and a good share of the tutorials online describe menus that no longer match. The name Le Chat is still lingering everywhere, including in Mistral's documentation: it's the same tool.

What changed since Le Chat

Vibe brings together two uses: an assistant for work, which succeeds Le Chat, and a coding agent for developers. Only the first concerns us here. Its main mode is called Work, and the old Chat mode is due to disappear.

At the time of writing, access to these features depends on your plan, and the free plan gives limited access: check in the tool.

Describe the result and let Work break it down

Work doesn't just wait for a question. It takes a task, breaks it into steps, calls the tools it needs, and asks for your approval before sensitive actions, like sending a message. For a simple question, switch the selector to fast mode. You don't need an agent to find a synonym.

For a real task, a weak prompt looks like this: "Prepare my meeting." Work doesn't know which one, with whom, or what you expect at the end. Here's the same need for the owner of a landscaping company meeting a property manager:

Prepare my Thursday appointment with the property manager (syndic) of the [NAME] residence.

Goal: renew our grounds maintenance contract, with an increase of [X]% that I have to justify.

Use the current contract and the attached service reports.

At the end I want a one-page note in Canvas:
- what we accomplished this year, with dates
- the arguments in favor of the increase, drawn only from these documents
- the three most likely objections from the property manager and a response to each
- what's missing from my documents to respond seriously

Show me your plan before starting. Send nothing and contact no one.

The expected note, the documents to use, and the last line frame the work. Canvas is the space where Work presents deliverables for you to review and edit. Ask for it when you want a document, not a conversational reply. The article on instructions for AI agents helps you write this kind of instruction.

Turn on web search, then demand the sources

Web search doesn't always switch on by itself. Mistral explains that you need to go through the + icon or type / in the input field, open the tools, and turn on web search. If you skip this step, the assistant may answer from memory on a recent topic.

Every answer drawn from the web includes links to its sources and a button that lists them. For news, Mistral relies on AFP and the Associated Press. You can also give it a specific address so it reads that page and analyzes it.

Work can also run tasks at regular intervals. That lends itself well to monitoring, provided you're precise about what deserves your attention. For a baker who tracks the prices of his raw materials and the rules of his sector:

Do a weekly watch for an artisan bakery in France.

Search the web for information published in the last 7 days on:
- flour, butter, and energy prices for professionals
- regulatory changes that affect bakeries

Keep only what could change a purchasing decision or an obligation. If there's nothing notable, simply write "Nothing to report this week."

For each item: one sentence, its date, the link to the source, and what it implies for a small bakery. Indicate when the source is a commercial article rather than an official or professional source.

The "Nothing to report" sentence prevents filler. Without it, a weekly watch will always find enough to make a report, even in weeks when nothing happened.

Turn a successful task into a Skill

A Skill is a reusable method: a folder containing a SKILL.md file, with instructions and a description, plus any templates or examples. The simplest approach is not to start from scratch. When a task went well, ask Work to save it as a Skill, then fix the draft. You can also create one from Context then Skills.

The description matters more than you'd think, because it's what decides when the Skill triggers. Mistral advises writing when to use it, and not only what it does.

Weak: "Help with quotes."

Better: "Use when I ask to review a client quote before sending, to check the legal mentions, quantities, and payment terms."

For the instructions, write as if you were briefing a colleague: the tone, the format, the steps, and an example. Here's a base for an accountant who chases his clients:

You prepare reminders for missing accounting documents for an accounting firm.

When I give you the list of a client's missing documents:
1. Write an email of under 100 words, polite and direct, that starts with the deadline.
2. List the documents as bullet points, with the relevant period for each.
3. Explain in one sentence why these documents are needed by that date.
4. Adapt the tone to the reminder number I give you: 1 for a simple nudge, 2 for a firm request, 3 for a call to book an appointment.

Stay factual: don't mention any penalty or legal consequence I haven't specified. Only prepare the draft; I'll review and send it myself.

Keep each Skill focused on a single job, and run it on real cases before relying on it: that's also Mistral's recommendation. If there's a gap with what you expect, fix the SKILL.md instead of creating a new, almost identical one. You'll find how to write these lasting instructions in the article on system instructions.

For a collection of documents you'll query often, prefer a library. Connectors give access to tools like Google Drive or Notion: the more access you open up, the more carefully you need to review what Work does with it.

Check your data settings before pasting anything

Mistral is a French company, which on its own says nothing about what happens to your conversations. On individual plans, including the free plan, its help center states that inputs and outputs are used by default to train its models, unless you decline. On the web, the setting is in the Mistral admin panel, in the Vibe Privacy section. On mobile, it's in the account settings. Its terms also provide that rating a response may allow that exchange to be used. Plans and settings change, so check them on your account and read Mistral's terms.

Before putting a client's data in, look at your company's rules: the article on what not to paste into a chatbot serves as a baseline, and the CNIL publishes recommendations on AI.

Vibe makes mistakes like the other assistants: a cited source may be badly summarized, and a well-presented note may contain an error. Reread what comes out, especially if you're sending it to a client.

To get started, take a task you do every month, write the expected result in five lines, and run it in Work with the instruction to show you its plan first. If the result suits you, save it as a Skill. You can then compare with the other tools using the ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini comparison, by putting Vibe through the same test.