Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude Sonnet 5

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 822 posts

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#271

Post by a_c »

docheinestages wrote: post #60

But does it burn tokens just like Opus? That's the feeling I have nowadays. Regardless of what model I choose, the 5-hour limit gets exhausted in the first hour or so.

"Claude Sonnet 5 is available everywhere today at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, 2026. It then moves to standard pricing at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.2"

"Sonnet 5 is an upgrade to Sonnet 4.6, but it uses an updated tokenizer that changes how the model processes text to improve performance (this is similar to the tokenizer change we introduced with Claude Opus 4.7). The tradeoff is that the same input can map to more tokens: roughly 1.0–1.35× depending on the content type. The introductory pricing is set so that the transition to Sonnet 5 is roughly cost-neutral."

If we trust them, then it is roughly the same as sonnet 4.6

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#272

Post by WhyIsItAlwaysHN »

jatora wrote: post #239
popalchemist wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether they believe it or not is immaterial. It is the end-goal they want to achieve, because then they own the means of production entirely.

I find these nefarious intention theories shallow. It can both be the case that the endstate is them owning the means of production without that being the intended guiding goal. Companies can chase profit without being Leninistic boogeymen.

There is no nefariousness in owning all the means of production, it's the endgame of maximizing profit.

However the result is exactly the same, concentration of power.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#273

Post by lucamark »

energy123 wrote: post #252
lucamark wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're referring to the Agentic search, but if you look at the Agentic computer use the cost is basically halved. However, I am also confused about market positioning. Too expensive to perform daily tasks - open souce models are much cheaper - and not frontier model to address complex real world problems. Rarely used Sonnet btw.

You're the second person that has said this but I cannot understand why you are interpreting the "Agentic computer use" graph in this manner. The graph shows that Opus is cheaper than Sonnet for the same performance. Unless I am suffering a cognitive blindness thing right now.

Wrong! Look at it better. It shows that Opus has superior performance but at higher cost.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#274

Post by m3h »

microtonal wrote: post #31

Claude Sonnet 5 is built to be the most agentic Sonnet model yet. It can make plans, use tools like browsers and terminals, and run autonomously at a level that, just a few months ago, required larger and more expensive models. I have been using Sonnet 4.6 more than Opus, because I'm mostly doing agent-assisted development and not fully agent-driven development. This announcement does not make me positive, I have fou…

I think you should try an OpenAI model like GPT 5.5. It is better at following instructions and boundaries set during prompt. It feels like a more capable "agent assistant" than Claude models but without loss of intelligence.

Most of my work involves "Agentic engineering" instead of fire-and-forget. I like to stay involved during the planning as well as review and ask a lot more questions from the agent than I've seen others doing. In a way, I'm using the agent in a sort of "hyper auto-complete" mode to fill in the blanks (rather big blanks) once I've set out the requirements, scope and design (sometimes specific module boundaries). This works best for me.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#275

Post by conradkay »

mattas wrote: post #221
m3h wrote: post #202

Important to note: "Sonnet 5 is an upgrade to Sonnet 4.6, but it uses an updated tokenizer that changes how the model processes text to improve performance (this is similar to the tokenizer change we introduced with Claude Opus 4.7). The tradeoff is that the same input can map to more tokens: roughly 1.0–1.35× depending on the content type. The introductory pricing is set so that the transition to Sonnet 5 is roughly…

"We can raise prices in two ways: (1) raise the price per token and (2) increase the number of tokens we generate on your behalf. We promise not to do (2) maliciously. Promise."

I think the incentives are less bad since a good chunk of usage comes from subscription plans.

There was a fairly major regression in Claude Code performance for some time when they changed the system prompt to try and make it less verbose (saving tokens). And if I'm not misremembering, there were a lot of complaints when they changed the default effort from high to medium.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#276

Post by tskj »

everforward wrote: post #159
Brendinooo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there's a real opportunity for one of these companies to invest time in a model that's tuned for, to use your term, agent-assisted developement. Trouble is, everyone inside their buildings seems to believe that no one will be working like that in a year or two.

There’s no way to justify their valuations if they get downgraded to a pair programming tool. They need fully agentic stuff to work and replace human engineers to even come close. Offhand, I’m not even certain whether a model like that could justify the constant retraining we’re doing on the agentic models. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend millions or billions on training to reduce hallucinations by 0.3% if yo…

Dario has publicly claimed each model has been profitable, even accounting for its training costs; it's just that each new model is exponentially more expensive to train than the last, so the income lags and it looks like the company is losing money overall.

Now, we can't know if this is true unfortunately, but it's not directly contradicted by anything that's known publicly at least. I thought it was an interesting way to frame it and makes the whole situation look marginally less bad.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#277

Post by sanderjd »

manojlds wrote: post #200
sanderjd wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I want is a harness that knows how to optimize this kind of thing for me.

Which is your own harness and your own evals for your tasks I guess

Maybe. But that sounds like a large amount of bespoke work for what seems like a common problem?

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#278

Post by brunooliv »

I only wish Opus 4.6 from earlier this year at a faster inference speed. Since Opus 4.6 things have been so much messier and the overall push for more agency isn’t really panning out for agent assisted development as much as they would like

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#279

Post by doctoboggan »

lucamark wrote: post #273
energy123 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're the second person that has said this but I cannot understand why you are interpreting the "Agentic computer use" graph in this manner. The graph shows that Opus is cheaper than Sonnet for the same performance. Unless I am suffering a cognitive blindness thing right now.

Wrong! Look at it better. It shows that Opus has superior performance but at higher cost.

No, you are misunderstanding the graph. Draw a vertical line anywhere, that is a "constant cost" line. For any given cost, Opus 4.8 has a higher performance than Sonnet 5. Only where Sonnet 5 effort is at medium or low would it make any sense to use it, as there isn't even an equivalent Opus effort level to compare to.

Alternatively you can draw a horizontal "constant performance" line and see that Opus is cheaper for a given performance level.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#280

Post by Natelinathan »

doctoboggan wrote: post #29

The cost per task chart is telling me that I should _never_ use Sonnet 5 above medium effort level - Opus always performs better for a given cost. So I guess the takeaway is that if Sonnet 5 medium isn't good enough for you, switch models, not effort levels.

I just re-wrote the /code-review skill anthropic ships to use Sonnet 4.6 for some tasks as it was using Opus for simple git diff commands and similarily mechanical tasks (launched 100+ agents for one of my diffs, cmon). I wonder how Sonnet 5 will impact my usage.

Does anyone else have any review token saving measures?

Post reply on HN