Claude Haiku 5.5 Wins Cheap Coding Test

Haiku 5.5 looks like the practical default for routine coding agents, though one Express task cannot establish broad model superiority.

• –The test shows a roughly 74% savings versus Sonnet 5.5 and 87% versus Opus 5.5.
• –Its strongest use case is delegated work where success matters more than maximum reasoning depth.
• –Developers should validate performance across repositories, languages, edge cases, and regression-heavy tasks.
• –Costs can rise sharply once prompts exceed 100,000 tokens, where Haiku 5.5 uses higher pricing tiers. Pricing documentation.
• –Adjustable effort settings give teams another way to trade off latency, quality, and spend. Model documentation.