North Mini Code

North Mini Code 1.0 is Cohere's first open-weights model built specifically for coding, released on June 9, 2026. It's a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 30 billion total parameters but only 3 billion active per token — 128 experts with 8 activated at inference time. That MoE design is the core trick: you get performance that punches well above the 3B active-parameter weight class while keeping inference costs and hardware requirements dramatically lower than a dense 30B model.

The model is purpose-built for agentic software engineering workflows. It supports interleaved thinking — reasoning steps interspersed with tool calls — so it can plan a multi-file code change, execute terminal commands, inspect results, and iterate. On SWE-Bench Verified it scores 67.6% (resolved) and on SWE-Bench Pro it hits 40.2%, putting it in competitive range with models several times its active parameter count. The 256K token context window is large enough to hold substantial codebases in a single pass, and it can generate up to 64K tokens of output.

The Apache 2.0 license makes this genuinely interesting for teams that want to self-host a capable coding agent. You can run it via vLLM, SGLang, Ollama, or Docker, and 26 quantized variants are available for running on consumer hardware. The tradeoff is clear: this is a code-specialist model, not a general-purpose assistant. It won't write your marketing copy or summarize your meeting notes — it's laser-focused on code generation, terminal tasks, and agentic SWE workflows. For that specific use case, it's one of the strongest open-source options available.