Best AI Coding Models for Freelancers

Devstral 2 is a next-generation, open source agentic AI model tailored for software engineering: it doesn’t just suggest code snippets, it understands and acts across entire codebases, enabling multi-file edits, bug fixes, refactoring, dependency resolution, and context-aware code generation. The Devstral 2 family includes a large 123-billion-parameter model as well as a smaller 24-billion-parameter variant (“Devstral Small 2”), giving teams flexibility; the larger model excels in heavy-duty coding tasks requiring deep context, while the smaller one can run on more modest hardware. With a vast context window of up to 256 K tokens, Devstral 2 can reason across extensive repositories, track project history, and maintain a consistent understanding of lengthy files, an advantage for complex, real-world projects. The CLI tracks project metadata, Git statuses, and directory structure to give the model context, making “vibe-coding” more powerful.

Devstral Small 2 is the compact, 24 billion-parameter variant of the new coding-focused model family from Mistral AI, released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license to enable both local deployment and API use. Alongside its larger sibling (Devstral 2), this model brings “agentic coding” capabilities to environments with modest compute: it supports a large 256K-token context window, enabling it to understand and make changes across entire codebases. On the standard code-generation benchmark (SWE-Bench Verified), Devstral Small 2 scores around 68.0%, placing it among open-weight models many times its size. Because of its reduced size and efficient design, Devstral Small 2 can run on a single GPU or even CPU-only setups, making it practical for developers, small teams, or hobbyists without access to data-center hardware. Despite its compact footprint, Devstral Small 2 retains key capabilities of larger models; it can reason across multiple files and track dependencies.