I use mistral-medium-3.1 for a lot of random daily tasks, along with the vibe cli. I'd state from my personal opinion that mistral is my preferred 'model vendor' by far at this point. They're extremely consistent between releases while each of them just feels better. I also have a strong personal preference to the output.

I actively use gemini-3.1-pro-preview, claude-4.6-opus-high, and gpt-5.3-codex as well. I prefer them all for different reasons, however I usually _start_ with mistral if it's an option.

Mistral hasn't been in the running for SOTA for quite awhile now

Not at the moment, but a release of Mistral 4 seems close which likely bridges the gap.