Codestral 22B vs GPT-5.2 Codex

Codestral 22B

Mistral AI

Codestral is a 22-billion-parameter code-specialized model from Mistral AI, released in May 2024 as the company's first dedicated coding model, trained with focus on fill-in-the-middle (FIM) completion, code generation, and repair across 80+ programming languages. Unlike Mistral's general-purpose Apache 2.0 models, Codestral was released under a separate non-production research license, reflecting its positioning as a professional coding tool requiring commercial API access for production deployment. Its FIM support made it particularly valued for IDE integrations and code completion tools that need to insert code within existing contexts rather than only appending to the end.

GPT-5.2 Codex

OpenAI

GPT-5.2 Codex is a coding-specialized variant from the GPT-5.2 family, designed for software engineering workflows including automated code generation, multi-file editing, and agentic development. It builds on GPT-5.2's improved instruction following and long-context capabilities, with optimizations specifically targeting programming tasks and agentic software workflows.