Haiku 5.5 came out yesterday at $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens for prompts up to 100K ($0.50/$2.50 above), against $4/$20 for Opus 5.5. Anthropic recommends it as a subagent for Opus and Sonnet on coding work, and it’s the first Haiku with an effort setting. Worth knowing: Claude Code’s built-in Explore subagent no longer runs on Haiku. It uses your main model, so on Opus 5.5 every Explore run goes through Opus. How to move subagents to Haiku:
- For your own subagents, add model: haiku to the frontmatter. Since 2.1.293 the alias points at Haiku 5.5 (on the Anthropic API).
- For all subagents, add this to settings.json: “env”: { “CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL”: “haiku”, “CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL_FORCE”: “1” } Without the second line, Explore and Plan ignore the setting. With it, subagents you deliberately put on a bigger model get overridden too. I’m keeping my main session on Opus and trying Haiku for search-type subagents. Has anyone tested Haiku 5.5 as a subagent yet? Does it find the right files, or do you lose more on redoing work than you save? Edit: checked my own last two weeks: 129 subagent spawns, only 2 were Explore. Most were implementation work I want on Opus, so FORCE would hurt me. Moving only research subagents to Haiku with model: haiku instead. submitted by /u/emarkosov
Originally posted by u/emarkosov on r/ClaudeCode
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