I’m a huge fan of Sonnet 4.6 for daily engineering work. I understand that Opus is better at one-shotting and un-supervised work, but for my own workflow as a professional software engineer I’ve found that Sonnet 4.6 gives me the best mix of accuracy, speed, and price. So when Anthropic released Sonnet 5, I was excited but skeptical… especially when their pricing announcement mentioned that 5 would have discounted pricing until the end of July. Why the immediate discount on a new model? Seemed sus. Well, it’s immediately obvious why. The model itself will tell you that Sonnet 5’s default “thinking” mode burns 30% more tokens than 4.6 did, but in my own experience it’s burning up to 5x the amount of tokens on similar tasks as 4.6! And I see essentially zero benefit in the quality of output or “intelligence” that it provides. I’m starting to think Anthropic knows people are getting more price conscious, tosses out a new “upgraded” model at a “discount,” and thinks we won’t notice that token usage and actual spend is so much higher than it’s replaced predecessor. Typical users don’t know that they can override to an older, unlisted model in /model, so Anthropic immediately pads their pockets by swapping out an efficient, effective model for a wayyy less efficient model with the same name. Absolutely abysmal business model on the face of it, but it’s been so obvious to me and no one else at work seems to be discussing it or comparing it to 4.6 but rather to Opus 4.8 (which I also find too expensive and total overkill for daily tasks). submitted by /u/No_Barnacles
Originally posted by u/No_Barnacles on r/ClaudeCode
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