# North Mini Code

6 Hacker News commenters recommended North Mini Code and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free model people say is competitive for everyday coding tasks, but critics say it makes more mistakes and struggles with tools.

## Why people recommend it

- Strong for its size (2 comments): "better than anything you can run locally in ~8GB" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48741184)) "felt this is good enough for 80-90% of my tasks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883080))

## What people warn about

- Makes a lot of mistakes (1 comments): "You have MoE models (gemma 26b, qwen 35b, north mini code 30b) who are pretty fast, but make a lot of mistakes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557467))
- Weaker at finding security bugs (1 comments): "it is a little worse than both for surfacing security bugs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48750973))
- Struggles with tool use (1 comments): "It just couldn't grasp the tools." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49929311))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Cursor Composer](https://hackerapproved.com/p/composer-2-5.md): 214 recommend
- [Qwen3-Coder](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen3-coder-next.md): 165 recommend
- [GPT-5.3-Codex](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpt-5-3-codex.md): 135 recommend
- [Meta Muse Glimmer 30B](https://hackerapproved.com/p/meta-muse-glimmer.md): 70 recommend
- [GPT-5.2-Codex](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpt-5-2-codex.md): 54 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "North Mini Code", https://hackerapproved.com/p/north-mini-code/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).