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North Mini Code is on par with the similar-sized MoE Qwen 3.6 and Gemma 4. It benches a little better than Gemma 4 26b a4b and a little worse than Qwen 3.6 35b a3b for most coding-related and agentic tasks. For my use case, or at least the use case I've tested, it is a little worse than both for surfacing security bugs, but all of the MoE models at this size are pretty bad at finding security bugs (they hallucinate a lot of false positives, which degrades the value of their real bugs dramatically). Poolside Laguna XS.2 is another in this category (30B-35B MoE, reasonably competitive on coding related benchmarks). Also free on OpenRouter. But, also, it's bigger brother, Laguna M.1 (225B A23B MoE), is also free on OpenRouter last time I checked. Worth a look. https://openrouter.ai/poolside/laguna-m.1:free The good thing about all the 30-ish MoE models is you can run them on any 32GB GPU, even old ones, at a very comfortable speed. A 24GB GPU can run the 4-bit quantizations if you use a quantized K/V cache. That's why there are so many of them. It's the sweet spot for "good enough to be useful for some coding tasks, small enough to fit on the GPU a lot of people have". The cheapest not rate-limited options that are actually pretty competitive with the frontiers are from DeepSeek and MiMo. DeepSeek V4 Flash and Pro are extremely cheap, their caching is the best in the industry (and their cached tokens are even cheaper), and Reasonix is an excellent CLI harness that is designed around maximizing cacheability of DeepSeek models, specifically. I used it for an hour last night and spent something like three cents. MiMo has token plans that are a pretty good deal (though confusing...the token plan buys credits, and credits are not a whole token, so you get billions of credits on the token plan for a few bucks, but it chews through it at a rate faster than 1 credit per token). But, DeepSeek V4 Pro is a consistently better model than MiMo. |