Codestral 22B v0.1

Overview

Mistral AI's 22B code specialist covering 80+ programming languages, with strong HumanEval and MBPP scores. Locked behind the restrictive MNPL license — personal and research use only.

When to pick this model

• Personal coding assistant on a workstation with 16–24GB VRAM
• Academic research on code generation and completion
• Internal experimentation before committing to a commercial license
• Polyglot codebases where coverage across 80+ languages matters

VRAM requirements by quantization

VRAM figures include model weights plus a typical 8k KV cache and ~600 MB runtime overhead (Ollama / llama.cpp baseline). Add headroom for higher context lengths.

Published benchmark scores

Scores published by the model author or aggregated from public leaderboards. Re-measured monthly by our editorial team.

Strengths

• HumanEval 81.1 and MBPP 78.2 — competitive with much larger models at release
• Broad language coverage including niche languages
• 32k context handles most repo files comfortably
• Strong fill-in-the-middle completion

Limitations

• MNPL license blocks all production and commercial use
• Outclassed by Qwen 2.5 Coder 14B for permissive-licensed alternatives
• 32k context is tight for large-repo agents

Architecture & training

Architecture: Dense 22B · code-specialized · 80+ languages

Training: Multilingual code corpus.

Quick start

ollama run codestral:22b

Or use the open-source MCP server to query this model from Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client.