Claude Haiku 5.5
- ID
- 32960
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 08 Oct 2026, 2:01 AM
- Fetched
- 08 Oct 2026, 5:15 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.anthropic.com/claude-haiku-5-5
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 7.5
- Created
- 08 Oct 2026, 5:15 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersai_ml_learnersai_agent_userssaas_founders
What happened
Anthropic announced Claude Haiku 5.5 (dated October 7, 2026), describing it as its cheapest, fastest small model, at roughly 75% lower running cost than Haiku 4.5. Vendor-reported benchmarks include OSWorld 2.1 offline-subset computer use at 72.4% versus 15.7% for Haiku 4.5, Terminal-Bench 4.0 at 39.2% versus 0.0%, and Humanity's Last Exam at 45.9% no-tools (57.4% with tools) versus 10.2% (18.7%) for Haiku 4.5. The same post halves Sonnet 5.5 cache-read pricing for roughly 20% cheaper agentic work and adds a monthly API credit for Claude Max and Team subscribers; Haiku 5.5 is the first Haiku-class model with an adjustable effort setting. The Hacker News thread drew 406 points and 192 comments.
Why it matters
If you route high-volume work (summaries, compaction, classification, database queries) or use a cheap model as a subagent for coding, the stated ~75% Haiku price cut and ~20% Sonnet 5.5 agentic cost drop change your per-request economics immediately, and the adjustable effort setting means cost-vs-quality is now a per-call parameter you can tune. Re-run your own eval suite before switching defaults: the headline numbers are vendor-run, and the Haiku 4.5 Terminal-Bench 4.0 figure of 0.0% is odd enough to treat with caution. If you already pay for Claude Max or Team, check what the new monthly API credit actually covers before budgeting separate API spend.
Discussion angle
Which workload would you actually move first — compaction/summarization, classification, or subagent coding — and what eval threshold would you require before changing your default model?