Vibe CodingAnthropic
Claude Sonnet 5
Anthropic's daily-driver coding model — near-Opus quality on coding and agentic work at roughly half the cost.
Claude Sonnet 5 closes most of the gap to Opus-tier quality on coding and agentic tasks while staying meaningfully cheaper — a solid default for the coding work that makes up most of a normal week, not just the hardest 20%.
Why it stands out
- Near-Opus coding quality at roughly 60% of the input/output price of Claude Opus 5.
- Full effort range up to
xhigh, so you can push it hard on tougher subtasks without switching models. - 1M-token context window with 128K max output, matching Opus 5’s ceilings.
- High-resolution vision support, useful for screenshot-driven UI and frontend work.
Good for
The default model for day-to-day coding agents and IDE assistants — reserve Opus 5 for the tasks that actually need the extra headroom.