A story of how Mistral Vibe CLI failed to install MCP
Mistral Vibe v2.18.4 · mistral-medium-3.5[high], on Windows
Spent 30 minuts talking with Mistral Medium (default model, default thinking) trying to install a locally cloned MCP server.
The server works fine, it works with all the other Harnesses I've been testing over stdio. But Mistral first chose to install it over HTTP, and when I gave it a config string copied over from Claude Code to direct it to the right transport, command and args, it just created its own mcp.json instead of putting those into the ~\.vibe\config.toml (which was the correct way forward). Then it still did not work, causing Vibe to attempt to debug the MCP itself, even when it was told that MCP works fine with other agents and even when it was explicitly told not to do it, and instead focus on its own configuration.
After 30 minutes of failures with Vibe, I have asked Claude Code to set it up - "Cooked for 3m 37s" (used Context7 MCP along the way) and it one-shotted the solution. Oh the humiliation.
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
And I think I found what's the source of confusion:
- Model is too dumb
Vibeskill does not have an example of a locally cloned MCP - all examples are either@my/mcp-serverorhttps://- Model is so dumb that it did not even attempt to load the Vibe skill 🤦♂️
For those unaware - Vibe skill is a built-in feature of Vibe agent harness with a >700 lines of info about itself. (If the Vibe creators are reading it - replace https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-vibe/blob/v2.18.4/README.md with https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mistralai/mistral-vibe/refs/tags/v2.18.4/README.md - loading the entire github interface is pointless, no? Perhaps that readme could have some additional references, cause right now it's adding very little value compared to the Vibe skill itself, with it repeating a lot of info that's already in the skill)
Oh, and Vibe does not even have any built-in feature to send feedback directly from the CLI, so I can't even let the Vibe creators inspect my conversation to improve the tool 🙄
Also, I think the the name Vibe is confusing mistral-medium-3.5 - at times it does not seem to know what I am refering to, and searches online that the LLM tries to do return garbage results.
So... yea, that's my feedback. Allow me to send you guys feedback and fix the Vibe skill, please.