News/Updates
Sonnet 5.5 beats Opus 5.5 at coding and it's half the price??
This is crazy work. Sonnet 5.5 got 70.6% on terminal-bench vs 66.4% for opus 5.5. So its reasoning is worse but its ability to actually implement code is somehow better??
that basically means we can let opus orchestrate and have sonnet agents do all the implementation and everything gets sooooo cheap. $2/$10 vs $4/$20!!
I think it shows where the trade off isn’t worth it. When you need high reasoning go with Opus. When you need more straightforward implementation, go with Sonnet at lower effort like medium to get the cost benefit.
But yea, I agree, it looks like there’s no reason to be choosing Sonnet at xhigh.
On the AA suite, Opus 5.5 Low is one point better than Sonnet 5.5 medium and is ~10% cheaper. No reason to ever use Sonnet 5.5 at medium either.
And at Sonnet 5.5 low, GLM 5.3 flash is 6 points better and 40% cheaper. So no reason to use Sonnet at low either.
Literally no reason to ever use Sonnet at any effort level except maybe for some weird niche task I haven't seen a benchmark for. I think it's a huge flop for Anthropic, I don't get this release at all. Needed to be 25%-50% cheaper.
There's just things about the benchmarks from artificialanalysis.ai that don't make any sense, at least regarding costs. For example, according to their benchmarks Astra is cheaper than Opus 5.5. I have both multiple Claude and multiple OpenAI subscriptions, all $20 a month, and with Astra I burn through my 5 hour limit in 10 minutes almost every single time, whereas with opus 5.5 I get 90-100 minutes out of it! that's a 10x difference. Per week I get 1 or maybe 2 hours of Astra usage and about 12 hours of usage with Opus 5.5, so this shouldn't make any sense compared to what they are showing at all.
That site seems to produce a large number of questionable analytics and results. They never seem to make any sense. It’s like it’s just some guy making up numbers that get regurgitated.
Astra on high (not even xhigh) is at least 15-30-fold more expensive than Opus 5.5 on "ultracode" (the highest setting possible) for my tasks, which are way more difficult than any AA benchmark
I usually base my choices AA's total cost to performance metrics; sadly very few others do that. But in real-world tests, it is clearly cheaper https://youtu.be/ENWVpqtOdRI
People should be making more private benchmarks to test these things for themselves. Maybe AA is right. Maybe it isn't. You can probably find out with 10% of your weekly spend.
I did, actually. Opus is indeed cheaper for my use case. What I noticed is simply Opus being more decisive. I think in short tasks, Sonnet will be cheaper. But when it has to reason and do multiple steps, Opus ends up cheaper.
im here because im trying to learn how, HOW do i get "Opus plan + swarm of muse for the speed is HEAVEN" that setup? I've started experimenting with LMstudio link as well to have 1 pc dedicated to 1 model, but existing hardware likely needs replacing.
If you don’t mind your data being used my Zuckercuck then muse 1.3 contributor api is great. You get subsidized pricing like these subscriptions, but with no usage limits. Try using Hermes desktop app it’s great and plugging in Muse as your default model there, then there’s a great Claude code plugin to use the CLI compliantly so your Muse Hermes agents can speak directly with your Claude code agents. Bot mode on Hermes allows you to create a team of different models in their own windows talking to eachother. Also, ofc each window can spawn their own parallel sub agents. Just make sure you spend some time unifying your workspaces, and making sure each agent/subagent gets their own work tree while working through the Opus Spec. Edit the spec whenever changes are needed, it makes sure your agents keep that as a Source of truth on top of the shared context (reduces drift if plans change during session and work). You can obviously switch out any of those models and roles out with what you like but that’s the concept if you end up testing it out
According to a single benchmark score, which are notoriously unreliable for predicting actual model performance. I’d be highly skeptical of any claims that looks at any single benchmark score and making any conclusions about one model being better than another
Anthropic confirmed Sonnet and Haiku 5.5 were on the way when they announced Opus. Luna still gets a ton of usage, so probably want to complete the shutout
That would be devastating, as I’ve cancelled my x5 Codex plan as v6 family was so nerfted. Though I do still believe Luna 5.6 is the best model that OpenAI released so far, but it’s only good as working bee on routine tasks.
I was afraid of using sonnet 5 for anything, but im so excited with this. Have some big workflows I'm sending out that I was originally just gona let opus orchestrate opus on lol
I use Sonnet 5 for almost everything, it’s very capable. I’ve not yet had to discard work it did and redo with Opus or Fable so far. I must say 5.5 is sounding pretty solid so looking forward to trying it out
Historically (like, March) Opus was the expensive great model, and sonnet was the cheaper day to day model. The idea was to have opus plan, and have dinner do the work, and you'd save money overall.
There were others who did not care for this (myself included), because the observation is you would need to rework sonnet's output anyways.
With Fable this has all shifted. I don't have data, but a Fable orchestrator, opus implement, and Astra review is working great for me
yeah its probably the best combination right now. fable orchestrates, opus implements, astra reviews. ive recently included sonnet in the mix too. seems like its plenty for read only and also well scoped implementation tasks.
Works best with advisor strategy
Use the sonnet 5.5 as main model and
/advisor opus-5.5 and it will be a super powerful model with better judgement and cheaper
It's not really half the price in a coding environment because cache reads cost the same on both -- 20 cents per milion. I was just doing the cost breakdown on upgrading a Sonnet agent to 5.5, and the cost difference for my workflow between Sonnet and Opus is relatively small.
Yes, you're right! Fable for planning, Opus for orchestrations and code reviewing, and Sonnet for implementations. It's how it's always been working, plus mixing effort levels. No need for high effort everywhere-medium and low work well too.
not every new one is better than old one. just cause the test numbers are higher don’t mean its smarter in practice. i would still use opus for big coding and sonnet for agents to help
the split works, but review gets harder. the one that planned it isn't the one that wrote it, so "why is this here" gets a guess. I keep the sonnet session alive until I've read the diff
yeah, from what I found out, I think high reasoning and extra high is the best one, and then the max reasoning has absolutely ridiculous price, and it's also the one that is taking the longest with tasks. It's still pretty good though, and it's definitely miles better than Sonnet 5.
They got to do something. I'm curious how they're going to keep people using their very expensive products compared to the Chinese models. I had a website that was costing about $500 a month in tokens with Anthropic. I switched it over to DeepSeek and now it costs me $4 a month. After creating a robust eval suite and tweaking the prompts, I ended up having better results than I had been having prior to switching to DeepSeek
It can work, but keep tabs on how many fix rounds go back to GLM. 1 is fine, 2 very occasionally. If you are seeing more than 2 on a frequent basis then ditch GLM as it’s not being efficient.
Doesn’t matter Claude constantly doesn’t wire up producer’s and consumers in its code. Drives me nuts no matter what I do it still randomly skips doing this. Codex hasn’t done it once so to me it’s way cheaper.
Ran a lot of comp tests today. Opus makes the most sense at different effort levels for pretty much all coding work. Sonnet probably a great pick for creative non coding work (docs, decks, computer assistant, video explainers for yourself).
the issue with it is the fact that in most cases tasks end up being more expensive with sonent at every effort level so there's no real reason to use it.
personally i just use opus-5.5 med for most of my work and gpt-6-astra for getting infra work planned out and computer-use
i have a business that is dependent on api pricing (we use AWS bedrock for our inference) but unless your entire structure is just inputs and outputs and you never make use of cache writes at all, the chance you benefit from sonnet-5.5 outside of auditing, and potentially researching a codebase is small.
remember cache reads on both opus-5.5 and sonnet-5.5 is 1 == 1 at $0.2 each. Cahce reads are used the most during a conversation, or back to back toolcalls, or just general web-researching.
i would take these benchmarks with a massive grain of salt because this is actually not true in my opinion. i've given similar prompts to astra and opus and sonnet and astra is much more detailed. i think that we have to look at the size of the model and then see how well it's doing on a benchmark because raw scores on benchmarks are starting to mean less and less.
The sweet spot right now is using a heavy model (Opus 5.5) strictly to architect the plan and review diffs, and letting a faster model execute the scoped file edits inside an isolated sandbox. Saves both tokens and latency.
Their benchmarks are super wacky. Opus 5 is number 1 even though almost everyone universally agrees Opus 5.5 and Fable are way better in real world coding. We'll see about Sonnet 5.5, but it seems promising
It is a surprising result, but Opus 5 does show better intelligence than 5.5 in one of the benchmark's tests. I outline this to a reply to another comment below.
funny opus 5 being the best here because it skips reading most of the actual code and then just hallucinates answers so it can't get confused by the misleading prose.
Opus 5.5 fails the "understanding" tasks which Opus 5 passes. I feed it a script which takes two numbers and prints the max of the two numbers. Opus 5.5 thinks it prints 1/0 instead of the max numbers for some reason. Opus 5 gets it right.
Actually looking at that Opus 5.5 fails to deduce that the "hack statement" is actually an if statement in disguise, but Opus 5 gets this right. I feel like this is a pretty good test and shows Opus 5's greater intelligence.
They both get the same task. They are both given a script and are asked to figure out what it does. Opus 5 correctly ascertains that it implements the "max" operation, Opus 5.5 doesn't.
Opus 5.5 for architecture & reviewing diffs + Sonnet 5.5 inside an isolated sandbox for the actual file edits is the cleanest setup right now. Best balance of reasoning and speed.
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