Curiosity · AI Model

Code Llama 13B

Code Llama 13B is the mid-size member of Meta's 2023 Code Llama family, fine-tuned from Llama 2 on a large corpus of code and long-context sequences. It supports infilling, instruction tuning, and Python-specialised variants, and was the go-to open coding LLM in 2023-24 before the DeepSeek-Coder and Qwen-Coder families surpassed it.

Model specs

Vendor
Meta
Family
Code Llama
Released
2023-08
Context window
16,384 tokens
Modalities
text, code

Strengths

  • Open weights under Llama 2 community license
  • Good 16K-context code infilling in its era
  • Widely supported in llama.cpp, vLLM, and Hugging Face

Limitations

  • Far below DeepSeek-Coder V2 and Qwen2.5-Coder on modern evals
  • No tool-use or chat-persona tuning
  • Licence excludes some commercial use cases

Use cases

  • Local code completion in VS Code / Neovim plugins
  • Offline coding assistants in air-gapped environments
  • Fine-tuning baselines for bespoke coding corpora
  • Classroom examples of open-weights coding LLMs

Benchmarks

BenchmarkScoreAs of
HumanEval≈36%2023-08
MBPP≈47%2023-08

Frequently asked questions

What is Code Llama 13B?

Code Llama 13B is Meta's 13-billion-parameter open-weights code-generation model, fine-tuned from Llama 2 and released in August 2023 alongside 7B and 34B variants.

Is Code Llama 13B still worth using?

For new projects, DeepSeek-Coder V2 Lite or Qwen2.5-Coder 14B is usually a better open-weights choice. Code Llama 13B remains relevant for legacy deployments and historical comparisons.

Where can I download Code Llama 13B?

Weights are available on Hugging Face under 'codellama/CodeLlama-13b' and related instruct / Python-specialised repositories.

Sources

  1. Meta — Code Llama announcement — accessed 2026-04-20
  2. Hugging Face — codellama/CodeLlama-13b-hf — accessed 2026-04-20