My experience with using Mistral with OpenClaw/Hermes/Odysseus
Honestly, I’m frustrated. I don’t know if you guys are just luckier than me, but I simply cannot get Mistral to work properly with AI agents.
The annoying part is that I actually have Mistral Pro and can just spin up API keys for agents. Honestly, huge shoutout to Mistral for that - it’s incredibly generous compared to OpenAI or Anthropic since you basically never hit a rate limit and can just let the agent cook.
But man, the actual performance is a total shitshow.
Every single agent (OpenClaw, Odysseus, Hermes) I try gets stuck in an infinite loop. I’ve tried multiple installation methods - Docker containers, dedicated VMs, even bare-metal systems - and they all faceplant. The tool calling is just straight-up broken.
I’ve been mostly using mistral-medium (3.5) since the consensus online seemed to be that its tool calling is solid. But in reality? It just endlessly asks me for permission. It’ll go: "Should I do X now?" I reply: "Yes, go ahead and modify the files." Then it literally comes back and asks me the exact same thing. Every. Single. Time. Sometimes it straight-up gaslights me - it'll claim it successfully updated a file, but when I check, absolutely nothing changed. It just gets stuck in the planning phase forever.
The crazy thing is, if I swap the model out for Qwen3.6 (local via ollama) mid-chat, it instantly starts working and actually modifies the files.
Am I doing something wrong here, or are you guys experiencing the same thing? Are there specific system prompts or parameters I should be tweaking? I really want to stick with Mistral - both for data privacy reasons and because I genuinely want to support European AI - but this is unusable.
Any advice would be massively appreciated.