Mamba-Codestral-7B
Mistral's pure-Mamba-2 code model: 7B parameters, 256K context, Apache 2.0, and linear-time inference for local coding assistants.
About
Codestral Mamba 7B is Mistral's 2024 experiment in post-Transformer architectures: a code model built entirely on Mamba-2, the selective state-space architecture, with no attention layers at all. Because inference cost per token stays constant instead of growing with context, Mistral tested it on inputs up to 256,000 tokens, double what GPT-4o offered at the time, and positioned it as a fast local coding assistant rather than a heavyweight reasoning model. It shipped on la Plateforme as codestral-mamba-2407 alongside raw weights on Hugging Face.
Mistral reported it beating CodeLlama 7B, CodeGemma 7B and DeepSeek-Coder on HumanEval, and the weights are Apache 2.0, which made it one of the few permissively licensed SSM code models. It never got a successor, and Mistral's attention moved back to Transformer-based releases, so consider it a finished artifact rather than a living line. Still, with over 20,000 downloads and GGUF/MLX community builds, it remains the easiest way to run a pure state-space code model locally.
Specs
Context window
Pricing
Free quota
API access
Weights
Released
Benchmarks
- Mistral-reported: beats CodeLlama 7B, CodeGemma 7B and DeepSeek-Coder on HumanEval (provider claim via VentureBeat, Jul 2024)
- Mistral positions it on par with SOTA Transformer-based code models (provider framing)
- No independent benchmark table verified
Provider-reported unless a source says otherwise. Benchmarks are marketing-adjacent by nature — treat them as directional.
Use cases
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: HF repo mistralai/Mamba-Codestral-7B-v0.1 created Jul 16, 2024 with 20,043 downloads and 626 likes (HF API, Oct 2026); Apache 2.0 on the model card; launch covered by VentureBeat Jul 2024 with Mistral's HumanEval claims. Open weights. Strengths: rare pure-SSM code model from a frontier lab, permissive license, strong community adoption (GGUF, MLX builds), 256K context. Docked for: (1) benchmark claims are Mistral's own with no independent replication; (2) no successor or maintenance signal from Mistral since 2024. License: Apache-2.0.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 8.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 5.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · HF repo mistralai/Mamba-Codestral-7B-v0.1 created 2024-07-16; 20,043 downloads, 626 likes (HF API Oct 2026)
- · Launch covered by VentureBeat Jul 2024; Mistral claimed HumanEval wins over CodeLlama 7B / CodeGemma 7B / DeepSeek-Coder
- · Pure Mamba-2 architecture; 256K context tested; shipped as codestral-mamba-2407 on la Plateforme
- · No successor or maintenance signal from Mistral since 2024