Poolside opens Laguna XS.2, a 33B coding model built for one GPU
Original: Introducing Laguna XS.2 and Laguna M.1 View original →
The open-weight coding model race has been heavy on press decks and light on usable options for developers who do not have a data-center budget. Poolside is trying to break that pattern with Laguna XS.2, a 33B-total, 3B-active model released under Apache 2.0 that the company says runs on a single GPU. At the same time, it made its larger Laguna M.1 model public for the first time, giving the market a new Western entrant built around agentic coding and long-horizon software work.
The numbers are the point here. Poolside says Laguna M.1 carries 225B total parameters with 23B active, while XS.2 is the smaller follow-up designed to be much easier to deploy. Both are available for a limited time through Poolside's API and OpenRouter, and XS.2 weights are live on Hugging Face. That combination matters because the practical bottleneck in coding agents is no longer just raw model quality; it is whether teams can actually run, tune, and route these models inside existing developer stacks without a frontier-cloud bill.
Poolside paired the release with two product previews, the pool terminal coding agent and the Shimmer cloud dev environment, making the model launch feel more like a full-stack bid than a one-off benchmark drop. The company also says XS.2 is trained from scratch, fully post-trained, and meant to push open progress faster by putting the model directly into developer hands. Even without claiming the overall frontier crown, that is a meaningful shift: a permissively licensed coding model sized for tighter hardware budgets changes what smaller teams can try.
The broader bet is easy to read. Poolside says this is the first time it has shipped models publicly, and that about 60 people across its Applied Research organization built the Laguna family. If developers adopt XS.2 for code agents, CI tasks, and internal IDE tooling, the release could matter less as a leaderboard event than as a test of whether open agentic coding still has room to grow outside the biggest incumbents.
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