Terminal-based coding assistants for AI-curious developers are hot these days, and the most popular choice appears to be Claude Code. But Anthropic’s commercial offering has a new open source rival: MiMo Code, released under an MIT license by Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi.
Unlike Claude Code, MiMo Code is not restricted to a specific LLM provider. It was also optimized for “long-horizon automated programming tasks,” according to the introductory blog entry. The software aims to “maintain decision quality and state continuity over dozens or even hundreds of execution steps.”
The AI community has taken notice of this release. Since its v0.1 release last week, MiMo Code has garnered 9,000 stars on GitHub, and has been forked 783 times.
And unlike Claude Code, which costs $20 a month to start, MiMo is free, and may not even require connecting to a cloud provider, if the user installs a model on their own machine.
Tackling Long Horizon Memory Retention
Large Language Models (LLMs) are inherently stateless. They don’t remember the context from one task to the next.
To maintain continuity, the frontier lab model providers resubmit all the source material with each prompt. For long-running agentic operations, this approach can be prohibitively costly, so it falls on the code assist tools to maintain the context of long-running jobs.
Such tools typically manage this problem by providing LLMs with a short summary of previous work. Such automated compression, however, can lead to errors in long-term reasoning.
Instead, MiMo Code tasks a sub-agent to extract key information to store in a copy of SQLite, or in markdown files, which later can be consulted. The software also runs two background processes, called “Dream” and “Distill” to deduplicate identical material and derive reusable CLI commands, respectively.
MiMo Code also comes with provisions for running complex jobs in parallel.
“When the task scale becomes large enough — for example, migrating an entire project from one programming language to another — and dozens or even hundreds of parallel work units need to be coordinated simultaneously, round-by-round tool calls are no longer sufficient,” the company blog post stated.
A weakness of agents is that they specify orchestration logic in natural language, which is a recipe for errors.
MiMo Code’s Dynamic Workflow casts orchestration logic as JavaScript that runs in an isolated sandbox. Because the code is deterministic, all the threads of a workflow are guaranteed to execute: There are no hanging “if” statements without corresponding “then” executions. There are no “for … while” loops that prematurely stop functioning.
A New Way to Run Agents
Unlike Claude Code, MiMo Code does not wire the user to a single proprietary environment. Installing the application involves downloading the code and installing via a npm command (It requires Node.js to run)
In fact, as a Linux terminal application, MiMo Code doesn’t need to connect to external resources at all. Using the Ollama framework, users can run MiMo Code against a model, such as Qwen 2.5 Coder, running directly in the environment.
For benchmarks, Xiaomi paired MiMo Code with the latest release of its own model, the MiMo-V2.5 released in April. In three separate benchmarks (SWE-bench Verified, SWE-bench Pro and Terminal Bench), MiMo Code outperformed Claude Code – running either Claude Sonnet or MiMo-V2.5 – in running one-shot repository-level issues.
“Most of MiMo Code’s design goals—multi-turn memory, background state maintenance, completion verification, and cross-session evolution—mainly show their value in real development scenarios that continue for dozens of turns,” Xiaomi’s blog post boasted.
In a video review, Tyson Cung compared MiMo Code and Claude Code across a few real-world scenarios. He concluded MiMo is best for prototyping and learning projects, but Claude Code is best for production work, where the safety guardrails can be well worth the $20 monthly fee.
“The best way to decide is to try both,” Cung concluded. “Use each one on a real project and see which one fits your workflow.”