I find that "vibe coders" (that is, people who do not know anything about programming, but nevertheless produce useful tools for themselves and others) are using a lot more tokens than we do as programmers.

I think this is partially because we're still attached to pre-LLM notions of architecture, good design and code quality (which are still important, but maybe less important than they once were and that we think they are), partially because their projects are in a messy state, so models have to work around the technical dept.

They're essentially trading off programmer time for LLM time (which is a good trade financially speaking).

There's lots more you can do! Use the model to monitor your deployments after they get deployed. Have them fix and watch CI issues for you. Run adverserial review. Automatically watch metrics every day and highlight performance regressions. Start reviewing your previous sessions to find ways to statically reject different failure modes and have the agent have more success earlier on etc.

Another thing to think about is, what would it take for you to care less about the understanding. Better integration / e2e tests? Performance validation? visualizing program and data flows? Better refactoring of your modules?

I expect they’ll change usage limits in some of the plans or introduce new plans with new limits

It's the "semblance of understanding" you're holding on to that is keeping your demand limited. I'm holding onto it as well, but I think these companies are assuming that human understanding will no longer be relevant for most codebases going forward.

I created a team of agents using Opus 5.5 to review and address findings on a job system I have in a side project with medium reasoning, and I burned through the 20x plan weekly limit in 2.5 days. They were using GPT-6-Sol for reviews, and it also used 85% of my OpenAI x5 weekly limit. Three hundred something commits in total.

OTOH, in the daily job, I have the team plan that's similar to 5x plan and I never had any limit problems, because I really need to understand be able to take responsibility for the code.

Totally different uses.

> I want to retain some semblance of understanding

How you do this (and how deeply) I think is really the limit. I am doing this by focusing heavily on the design phase with grilling and trying to continually improve process to need less effort in the review phase. Are your models doing automated reviewing and testing before pushing out the PR (themselves)?

I think in the long run as models and the tools around them get better and cheaper, those that abdicate understanding will be able to achieve more. Although programmers think of that as irresponsible, ask yourself what does a tech lead do? And then what does a CTO do, etc?

Cache read is the same as Opus as well where most agentic workflow cost comes from.

Not quite sure where this fits well. Maybe small one one off requests like using Claude desktop/web?

Plan longer chains of work / higher level goals that can be broken down into multiple chains of work. This will allow you to automate more work units to be worked on.

The speed of your manual reviews become the limiting factor, which you should be doing at some level to maintain sanity, even if there are enough ideas to be worked on to maintain a review queue.

When they inevitably drop allocation after post-launch hype dies down.

I find that I can do 4 to 7 sessions in parallel, and still review everything in depth and co-design.

I mostly use Fable though, Opus only via sub-agents.

I've been vibe coding a game and running multiple Opus 5.5 in parallel on Claude Code Cloud, 5x Max plan, and I'm yet to hit a session limit too. Not sure when I'd use Sonnet. Though it would be nice to switch back to Pro I guess

Useful for API requests, when using AI in the product rather than to build the product.

Try telling an agent to go through your backlog.

I am mostly at the same point right now you are, but I think in the future with those "gas town" ideas we might be managing even more agents each.

Also, I've recently begun experimenting with specific tasked agents running on a cron like timer for non-dev work. (checking emails, managing small business tasks, etc). Once I started using Claude code in this way, the number of agents I can imagine running has skyrocketed. So I guess what I am saying is that I look forward even cheaper tokens going forward.

The only advantage I could anticipate is I still hit session limits with Opus 5.5. My usage shows I'm on-track reach my weekly reset with room to spare, but yesterday I ran into a session limit. I switched down to Sonnet 5 for the next session, but performance benefit of Sonnet 5.5 is a compelling alternative for managing session limits.

One reason might be that Sonnet tends to be a lot faster, so since its almost as smart as opus maybe you use it to get work done quicker. In latency terms not throughput.

Subagents.

I understand the point that you are making but why do we have to fulfill the supply just as much as demand. There is a demand frenzy going on right now with still being substantially subsidized.

Why do we have to burn tokens just for the sake of it if we aren't finding any actual productive use of them?

> And this might slow down the funding enough that they never reach escape velocity with the training run scaling. But we'll see.

I would consider this to be good rather than bad, or just neutral...? Given the past record of these companies, I wouldn't try to wish them luck for reaching escape velocity, as if I feel like perhaps it can have more net harm than positive.

And especially so if you are already suggesting that current models are good enough for your work already. More improvements or escape velocity might not really translate anywhere to the actual work that you are doing economically but it could translate into a more consolidated form of wealth and control.

I am imagining that your workload is quite complicated and that, the AI being good enough means that it is most likely good "enough" for other use cases as well (that "enough" is doing quite some heavy weight lifting here)

So what is the point of advancing further to reach escape velocity. The good argument (for the sake of neutrality) that i see is are advances within science but that's kinda about it whereas the downsides of p(doom) as many are now genuinely suggesting is more terrifying.

Perhaps it can be worth it to ask, shall we stop or just stopping and asking what's the point. A form of self introspection on what these companies ideals actually wanted when they were formed and if they have completed it or not, but I suppose when trillions of dollars depend on you, you do have some incentives to not stop. We will have to wait and see how it all pans out.

  More concurrency than that isn't really practical for me if I want to retain some semblance of understanding.

Why isn't that worth reading into? I care about the experience of actually using the model, not hypothetically what it could achieve without overactive guardrails

I believe you meant to cite the Opus 5.5 System Card which states:

> Claude Opus 5.5 scored 66.36% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 with safeguards enabled; requests flagged by the safeguards were answered by a fallback model following the default server-side fallback policy (2.5% of requests, affecting 10% of trials).

> https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/fc1b44717c85dc068bc6ba50242199...

I cannot find a Sonnet 5.5 system card.

I disagree, I think we should read a lot from it, as it stands in this benchmark Opus performs worse than Sonnet, it doesn't really matter why.

Anthropic made it that way, and I'd say the lower score is accurate.

And Sonnet 5.5 is more expensive than Opus 5.5 to hit that score on terminal bench!

it could be that, it could also be that sonnet max looks to burn about 60% more tokens than opus max

AA intelegence index (agent harness doesn't have sonnet data yet) on max: Astra 27k Fable 5.1 78k (Sonnet 5) 118k Opus 5.5 119k Sonnet 5.5 193k

Opus 5 was previous record holder so hats off to Anthropic on blowing it away on token churn.

That's frankly hilarious. What was the fallback for Opus 5.5? Was it Sonnet 5 or 5.5?

I suppose it also explains how FrontierCode scores seriously dip at Opus/Xhigh and Sonnet/Max?

So I suppose the easy fix for Anthropic would be to have Opus 5.5 now fall back to Sonnet 5.5, right?

Isn't that a worry then that the same bench has so much difference in what triggered fallback for one model and what did not in another?

Daybreak Blue is not bad and the bar to get into OpenAI's program is reasonable.

what is the easyest way to use the chinese models and which harness does work with them well?

It does vey well at one shotting a PacMan clone, pretty much perfect. https://jonclegg.github.io/pacman-bakeoff/entries/claude-son...

2nd only to Opus 5.5, which is perfect. https://jonclegg.github.io/pacman-bakeoff/entries/claude-opu...

Up until very recently, all models struggled with this.

All results: https://jonclegg.github.io/pacman-bakeoff/

Does anyone really still care about these pelicans?

Any model release it’s the top comment, I do not understand why.

This is evidence that Sonnet 5.5 wasn't yet trained on the HN comments from the Opus 5.5 release. Maybe Pelicanmaxing will lead to 127000 thinking tokens being used on Max.

This is great news because it means the model has not been benchmaxxed on stupid metrics.

PS: the next human that brings up pelicans on bicycles should try to draw them.

I like the one where the pelican is using the non-pedalling leg to control the handlebars because its wings won’t reach!

The contrast between Anthropic, who seem to be training their models to output ever-increasing numbers of reasoning tokens, and Fireworks's Ember-1, which was explicitly trained to preserve the quality of a model's responses while cutting down on reasoning, is interesting. Claude Code also uses more many tokens per task per model than any other harness in benchmarks.

I feel the fact that these models always modify the body design of a pelican to fit the bike rather than the other way around represents a fundamental issue with AI.

Sonnet 5 had the same problem with ‘max’. In a free sub, I would never get an answer back even for very simple prompts. It would just churn on nothing and return max token usage reached.

I’m not sure whether that’s a feature or a bug at this point though.

Where do you run sonnet/opus where you are limited to 128k, given they are both 1M context window models?

Thank you for the pelicans sir, how do you think they compare to other models in Sonnet’s pricing/capability range?

what's most surprising is the difference between high and xhigh

that pelican one-pedaling

“Pelicans are solved.”

I think the next models will be benchmaxxing on the Pelican benchmark tbh

Per the charts, there is largely no point to using Sonnet 5.5 at high+ as opus low generally will give similar performance at similar or lower cost.

But Sonnet 5.5 at medium and below gives you a cheaper option at a performance worse than the lowest thinking Opus (low), which may be viable for "low intelligence" use cases.

At low and medium effort it is 1/3 cheaper, at high it’s a step above Opus/low. It only looks worse at xhigh.

There's a sort of magical thinking needed to answer a question like that. You might say it comes down to "feel" of the model; i.e., the indefinable differences in the way that they speak to the user and approach problem solving. Perhaps Opus is suited for tasks that tackle new ground, while Sonnet might be better at tasks that are more grounded in the code.

Ultimately it's slightly ridiculous to define model capability on a single axis. It's like a standardized test. Sure, you can line people up by their ACT score, but that doesn't mean a doctor and a brilliant artist who both do well on the ACT have an identical intelligence or approach to life. It just can't be captured.

The cost / performance chart shows that in almost all configurations, it looks worse than Opus. Why would you use Sonnet 5.5 on xhigh if you would get better results (higher score, cheaper cost) on Opus 5.5 high?

This screams to be that Sol vs Terra model problem that OpenAI had. On paper half the price, in actual usage the price gap was so close for less good results, that everybody just spammed Sol.

It appears, at least from a quick look, to be noticeably faster than Opus. If true, and you don't need xhigh/max reasoning for your use case (like a well-defined set of code changes), Sonnet might get the job done much more quickly.

With that said, at that point, I'd probably use something like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, which is way faster and significantly cheaper, and probably not noticeably dumber for most use cases.

I'm honestly not sure where they're getting their 30% numbers from at all. In every single chart that they chose to display except for one, it costs similar or more than Sonnet 5, while also being comparable in price to Opus.

Maybe it's buried within their system card but I think that this would be one of the first things they'd want to show in the announcement article and they fail to do so.

I really don't know who does Anthropic's marketing but they always seem to a pretty terrible job in their announcements from my perspective.

just shows you how little control of output these labs actually have. They are training two models that kind of ended being the same so whatever they were doing specifically didnt make much difference.

t/s maybe? IDK, because their token speed comparison was against Sonnet 5.

It literally does not?

Say that to Luna's face. Ya all bringing up this not-so-cheap-nowadays chinese models and not that more intelligent than luna and bringing "cost" as the only factor.

If it's for personal use, is there a reason you don't want the subscription?

Anthropic's $20 subscription gives >$500 worth of credit by most measures, which is pretty similar, and you get a better model. Their raw API prices have fat margins.

And as another commenter said, Luna is the cost leader at the moment if you really need API pricing.

Obviously not as "intelligent" but almost 10x cheaper

Mimo 2.6 Pro: 0.04/0.4/0.87

Sonnet 5.5: 0.2/2/10

Opus 5.5: Sonnet prices times 2

What I dont understand is their cache writes ($2.5). Why is that not covered by input cost?

What model are you using ?

Subagents.

Mythos is what they thought was too dangerous to release, fable was what they made after they worked on cybersecurity detection. As they say in the notes, this version of sonnet now has a similar screening process

Well, it's performance "surface" (is there a better term for this?) is probably very narrow compared to Fable :)

You have to actually spend some effort reading the article they published to answer your own question.

doom marketing at its finest

You should read the actual docs for the CVP. At the very top:

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14604842-real-time-cy...

> This article applies only to Opus and Sonnet class models, but doesn’t apply to Claude Opus 5.5. We'll soon be expanding the Cyber Verification Program to include Opus 5.5 and Mythos class models

You obviously should not expect the CVP to cover this model either.

I had it look at some 30+ year old C code I wrote in college and it triggered some sort of guard rail. I mean, the code was bad and full of buffer overflows, but I already knew that.

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14604842-real-time-cy... says that Cyber Verification Program doesn't apply to Opus 5.5 yet, they hope to roll it out for 5.5 "soon"

I have been trying to convince the safe guards that analyzing a C++ compiler from 2003 isn't particularly relevant to modern cybersecurity. It seems Anthropic disagrees.

IDA Pro and Ghidra, thankfully, still lack such safeguards...

(No other model I've tried has refused either FWIW.)

Working on a write-ahead log implementation, I had Opus 5.5 look to verify that it was durably writing as safely as possible. It got flagged and forced me to Opus 4.8. Switched to OpenCode + OpenRouter and continued working.

Funnily enough the Fable safeguards are the worst and testing Sonnet 5.5 didn't trigger them as much as it even did for Opus on my benchmarks[1].

1 - https://bench.killswitch-lang.org

Yup. As far as I can tell, the Cyber Verification Program does absolutely nothing.

I recently wanted to work with ESP 32 and bluetooth presence detection for my smarthome. Claude also immediately flagged the request and degraded it to Sonnet 4.6. Went to Codex which had no issues

Meanwhile, their model commits felonies, and nobody at Anthropic goes to jail.

Aaron Swartz committed suicide over over-aggressive prosecutor for what was basically scraping a website for PDFs that were paywalled, but all funded by public funds / tax payer funded, then we have LLMs that just hack into websites and cause chaos within.

Really then what is the point of the Cyber Verification Program?

In general I am sympathetic to the argument that a chat interface can't really distinguish between white hat and black hat pen testing, but it seems absurd to have a verification program if it doesn't skip most of those checks.

As soon as I started getting blocked I felt all of my trust toward Anthropic instantly and permanently evaporate. I do not want a nanny tool. I do not want Anthropic deciding what I am or am not allowed to do with an LLM. They trained their models on information they scraped from the internet and real life and now they want to gate-keep the results? Hard no.

> Paying $200 a month and part of their Cyber Verification Program but can't use Opus 5.5 or Sonnet 5.5 for any authorized bounty work. Immediately get flagged for `Cyber`.

AI providers still haven't realized how much cash they could rake in if they provided fully unrestricted models.

lol I got flagged for using the word fuzz, not even in a security context (it was a parser so security adjacent but still).

Give them a break, they got into a War with Trump over this..it will come soon enough

Opus 5.5 in my experience outshines Fable 5.1 anyway. May as well have Opus do plan, breakdown and review, and Sonnet implement.

You might as well use Opus for everything there.

Changing model would be cache busting spiking usage for no good reason when Opus can do it all.

Haiku 5.5 might fit well though depending on pricing.

Agree with afro88. Opus 5.5 as competent as Fable 5.1 on complex adversarial review of material and equations planted with errors. I still use both for a bit of variety.

Do you even need Fable for much of anything now? I’m basically using it as a reviewer at the end of whatever I’m working on, and even then I’m really not finding much benefit.

Agreed. I’ve found that Anthropic [dot] com at least honors “reduce motion” accessibility settings, and that makes their site a bit more useable.

the (Ai) factory must grow!

Wouldn't make sense to use anything below 5.5 from Anthropic at the moment. But pretty sure this is just an awkward transition phase of at most a week or two until Fable 5.5 is out.

Benchmarks were always barely useful to begin with. Gotta actually try the model.

I saw that with corporate software too. What works is creating a skill with the task steps, it fades its initial reasoning. (I am not talking about observer safe guards, but the safety RTL).

Would Jev-type functionality be a reason to dust off Haiku?

I always tell coworkers if they're gonna use Claude to just stick to only Opus and Fable. Sonnet is a waste of time that does a bad job at a bad price.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash may be chatty but it's cheap, fast, and reliable. I'm not sure what the upside of Sonnet is supposed to be. Right now it feels like a trap.

The latest Haiku release is almost a year old. Clearly they don't care about the small-but-capable part of the market at all.

> This is YET AGAIN another Sonnet model that is just a FAR worse version of Opus at every part of the cost AND speed curve.

It's been out for an hour and you've already concluded this?

my feeling is you're most likely wasting money using Opus for implementation. The plan and task breakdown should be specific enough that Sonnet can implement without you noticing a difference.

I was talking about this with a friend this weekend. We both work in the field and test new models within minutes of them being released. We both immediately clocked Opus 5.5 as being cracked within the first hour. Went on HN and the launch announcement was full of people whining and pointing at cost/token charts vs Chinese models. It was like the upside-down world.

We were both sad that HN has become a negative signal news source on AI lately - you're much more likely to be misled by this website in 2026 on the topic of frontier AI. If you're reading this comment, you should do your own research vs trusting the "Astra is 1000% the best" or "Deepseek is the $/tk KING" comments swarming these announcement posts.

Astra is still the uncontested #1 code generator.

I mean, they worked really hard for this. Back in February everybody loved them.

Can't wait for it to get to the point where it's like an internet subscription: unlimited tokens 24/7/365 at a low, fixed monthly price.

Fable is no longer on the price/performance pareto frontier. They will probably release an updated Fable at some point that will be frontier intelligence until the next Opus.

"Their" benchmarks (and not just Anthropic's) look sssooooo suspicious that they would probably manage to rank Sonnet above Fable for some of their tasks which would just be next level non-sense ..

Models are getting more efficient far faster than they are getting more intelligent at the moment. From a marketing angle it's more impressive to focus on that, and fable would look orders of magnitude more expensive for only marginal gain, distracting from what they're trying to show here

cutting edge fable is for them not you and they're not going to share the metrics until they give you access.

Fable 5.5 probably drops soon so it would just be confusing.

5 was definitely bad. 5.5 seems a lot better so far. But still not close to Fable in terms of quality.

> In the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

lol, MiMo 2.6 Pro basically matches Sonnet 5.5 high (mind you, not xhigh or max) at a far lower price point.

It's a bit misleading I think because these benchmarks are for Max level, at which Anthropic newest models use crazy amount of reasoning tokens. And we know that intelligence scales with their number.

Cost are bigger than Opus 5.5 for that effort

Important to note that lower model + higher reasoning gives a different (not higher) quality of response than higher model + lower reasoning.

Some tasks are reasoning shaped by nature and you can't just throw a big model at it.

This is crazy, what is the point of all these equivalent models?

Yup. Recursive self improvement presented in hard numbers.

It's long overdue. Sonnet 5 was terrible API value for agentic coding, there were open models like GLM-5.3 Flash that blew it out of the water at 1/20th of the price.

OpenAI and Anthropic's lead is vanishingly small at this point.

There's even less of a place for it considering the Opus price drop as well, I'll still try it but I see no reason to not just do Opus Low/Med instead.

Interested to see if new Haiku gets a big price drop and is comparable to Luna, Haiku is just incredibly out of date with current basement bin pricing.

If you're on a Claude plan and have a lot of tasks at the moment that don't require the frontier, Sonnet is a good model to do that since you get more usage out of it.

Sonnet 5 was not a good model though - hopefully Sonnet 5.5 makes the leap that Opus 5.5 did.

Well, always watch also the number of tokens used (and price). Intelligence scales with tokens so you might make Luna as smart as Sol with crazy amount of them :)

Also, these are benchmarks...

Open AI is terrible at diversifying their offering. We use Anthropic models via AWS bedrock where inference is deployed in EU regions due to strict compliance reasons. We've been wanting to try out the new Open AI models for ages, but they don't offer the models in any EU region. Open AI is losing a ton of money they can milk from corporations because of that.