Granite Code — IBM Open Source AI Coding Models

What is Granite Code?

Granite Code is IBM's family of open-source code language models, ranging from 3B to 34B parameters. Trained on 116 programming languages with a deduplicated dataset of 3-4 trillion tokens, these models deliver strong performance on code generation, completion, and explanation tasks.

Answer-Ready: Granite Code is IBM's open-source code LLM family (3B to 34B parameters) trained on 116 programming languages. Apache 2.0 licensed, it ranks among top open-source code models on HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks.

Best for: Teams needing a self-hosted, commercially-licensed code AI. Works with: Ollama, vLLM, Hugging Face, any OpenAI-compatible server. Setup time: Under 5 minutes with Ollama.

Model Variants

Each has -base (completion) and -instruct (chat/instruction) variants.

Key Strengths

1. 116 Languages

Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Go, Rust, C/C++, SQL, and 108 more.

2. Apache 2.0 License

Fully open for commercial use — no restrictions, no fees, no CLA.

3. Benchmark Performance

Granite 34B-code competes with Code Llama 34B and StarCoder2 15B on:

• HumanEval: Python code generation
• MBPP: Multi-language programming
• DS-1000: Data science tasks

4. Fill-in-the-Middle

Supports FIM for IDE-style code completion:

<fim_prefix>def add(a, b):
    <fim_suffix>
    return result<fim_middle>

5. Long Context

Supports up to 128K tokens for large codebase understanding.

Deployment Options

# Ollama (easiest)
ollama serve
ollama pull granite-code:8b

# vLLM (production)
pip install vllm
vllm serve ibm-granite/granite-8b-code-instruct

# Continue.dev (IDE integration)
# Add to ~/.continue/config.json

FAQ

Q: How does it compare to Code Llama? A: Granite 34B matches or exceeds Code Llama 34B on most benchmarks, with a more permissive Apache 2.0 license (vs Llama's custom license).

Q: Can I use it commercially? A: Yes, Apache 2.0 — no restrictions on commercial use.

Q: Best model size for coding? A: 8B offers the best speed/quality tradeoff. Use 34B for complex multi-file tasks.