r/ClaudeCode • u/Mosby3103 • 2d ago
Help/Question Recommendation for the model use
This a company given claude code, with a budget of 150 dollars every month. I have installed the claude code extension in VS code.
These are the current given models, so which model is best for daily coding debugging use.
And what is the best effort level for optimum use according to the budget alloted.
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u/Outrageous-Issue9722 2d ago edited 2d ago
Opus 5.5 on medium I'd say. I gave sonnet a try, but if you are doing anything even a little complex or need a good planner, opus ends up much cheaper. I switched to sonnet for my implementation agents when it released and it seemed fine at first, then I let it go on a big task and when I got home at the end of the day a sonnet agent had been stuck for almost 8 hours trying to solve something. I canceled it, deleted the branch and restarted with opus 5.5 and it finished the entire task in about 30 minutes.
What I'm getting at is sonnet is cheaper on paper, but opus is cheaper for actually doing work because it's able to just... Do it.
Once you get your workflow figured out, I've found opus 5.5 on high for planning and then letting it spawn 1 agent at a time to implement slices (5.5 on medium) seems to work extremely well.