Claude Sonnet

Long-term owners

I just rebuilt a fairly simple personal app that I've been maintaining for my family for nearly 30 years, and had a blast doing with an AI agent

Feb 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• Claude OpusRecommended as a top coding model that fixes bugs and ships features with fewer mistakes than earlier LLMs, though critics cite weak architecture choices, usage limits and confident errors.3331recommend
• OpenAI GPTRecommended for strong coding, debugging and research help with good reasoning and token efficiency, though critics cite hallucinations, overcomplication, verbose output and high cost.1205recommend
• DeepSeek V4 FlashA very cheap, fast model that people find close to frontier quality for coding and everyday tasks; critics say it errs more, loops, and needs steering.828recommend
• FableRecommended as a top coding model for hard, long-running tasks and large refactors, though critics cite over-engineered code, costly usage limits and safety guards that switch models mid-task.823recommend
• Claude Fable 5Recommended for long-horizon agentic work and hard reasoning, debugging and research problems where it beats Opus, though overbroad safety filters often block legitimate security and biology tasks.774recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 1847 comments. Each links to the original.

1. providing a detailed plan, and even then the implementation might take 10x the amount of time it'd take for sonnet or Gemini 3 to crunch through the plan

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “ZAYA1-8B: An 8B Moe Model with 760M Active Params Matching DeepSeek-R1 on Math”

2. it usually works very well if you have well defined inputs and outputs, I much prefer it over writing tests manually, but you have to be very careful

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “AI helps ship faster but it produces 1.7× more bugs”

3. I'm finding the difference just between Sonnet 4 and Sonnet 4.5 to be meaningful in terms of the complexity of tasks I'm willing to use them for.

   Recommends · Nov 2025

4. Took a lot of guidance both in terms of making it test its own code and architectural/style decisions and I also use Sonnet, but it got there.

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Opus 4.5 is going to change everything”

5. Felt Sonnet/Opus was much better at figuring out whats wrong with the current React implementation and fixing it than it was with React Native

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “We rewrote our Rust WASM Parser in TypeScript – and it got 3x Faster”

6. Claude has one of the best interfaces with connectors, skills, and plugins galore, but the model and limits are restrictive on the free tier.

   Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber”

7. I noticed a step change in what was possible here around Claude Sonnet 3.7 in terms of being able to analyze my own unpublished work

   Recommends · Jan 2026

8. Look at Sonnet 3.5 -> 3.7 -> 4.5 -> Opus 4.5; that was 17 months of development and the leaps in performance are quite impressive.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “2025: The Year in LLMs”

9. 4 was decent for specific things, especially self contained stuff like tests, but couldn't do a good job with more complex work.

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Qwen3-Coder-Next”

10. Sonnet works much better (compared to Opus) for tasks I want to be in control of architecture and just need a faster code input

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed”

11. Sonnet 4.6 follows instructions much better than 4.5 and it generates code much closer to our already in-place production code

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Are LLMs not getting better?”

12. have experience with Sonnet 4.5, and it's only marginally better than the previous versions IME. It still often wastes my time

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography”

13. Sonnet's code worked, as long as you didn't touch any audio settings, because then it exploded with spectacular kernel panics.

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Ask HN: Can you tell the difference between Claude Sonnet and Opus?”

14. I would say sonnet 46 still beats gpt 54 for coding (at least in my use case) But after about 45 minutes I'm out of my window

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Claude Opus 4.7”

15. If your claim is that there's no substantive difference between Sonnet 3.5 and Fable, then we live in very different worlds.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality”

16. The claim about improved instruction following is the most important line in the announcement if you're building on the API.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Sonnet 4.6 System Card”

17. you can fire off a Sonnet agent at low-mid reasoning at it'll be cheaper than if you had Opus do that summarization itself

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Sonnet 5.5”

18. In short, Sonnet 5 Low/Medium is more cost efficient, if its a task below Opus 4.8 Medium. For the rest its expensive

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Claude Sonnet 5”

19. I use a lot of sonnet 4.5 just because it doesn't involve all this waiting even though I find sonnet to be kinda lazy

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “OpenAI signs $38B cloud computing deal with Amazon”

20. you can get claude to throw together a working demo of whatever wild idea you have without needing to write any code

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Sonnet 4.6 System Card”

21. The latest models are radically better at this. We noticed a massive improvement in quality starting with Sonnet 4.5

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “We gave terabytes of CI logs to an LLM”

22. Claude Sonnet w/ these docs in context build a nearly ~90-100% accurate implementation for most stuff I throw at it

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “The fate of "small" open source”

23. 4.5 is now excellent at many things.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Qwen3-Coder-Next”

24. Anthropic literally don't allow you to use the 1M context anymore on Sonnet and Opus 4.6 without it being billed as extra usage immediately.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “GPT-5.4”

25. I have been trying to convince the safe guards that analyzing a C++ compiler from 2003 isn't particularly relevant to modern cybersecurity.

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Sonnet 5.5”

26. refused to give me instructions on taking the life of another when I asked something like - "how do I kill a running process by name?"

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters”

27. It goes into plan mode and/or heavy multiple agent for any reasons, and hundred thousands of tokens are used within a few minutes.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Sonnet 4.6 System Card”

28. Anthropic's decision to restrict security research on even Sonnet makes that gap (and thus an attackers opportunity) even larger.

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “New serious vulnerabilities spiked around release of Claude Mythos Preview”

29. past 8 hours with the Sonnet 4.5 version I hit the "vibe limit" where it becomes easier to just write/edit the code yourself

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Claude Fable 5”

30. 3.7 was not all that great.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Qwen3-Coder-Next”

31. When given just the binary and asked to reverse engineer, Claude Sonnet quickly identified that some utility functions looked like some Fabrice's library code

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Claude Code Teaching macOS to Natively Print to the HP Laser 1008a”

32. I think if you honestly don't believe there is a major difference between 3.x and 4.7 I don't think there is much anyone will be able to do to convince you.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “The bottleneck was never the code”

33. I just rebuilt a fairly simple personal app that I've been maintaining for my family for nearly 30 years, and had a blast doing with an AI agent

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed”

34. For smaller tasks or iteration on existing code, I've started using Sonnet in the web interface with the file as context instead.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide”

35. I got stuff done with Sonnet 3.7 just fine, it did need a bunch of babysitting, but still it was a net positive to productivity.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Qwen3-Coder-Next”

36. the advantage of not having to set up multiple solutions from multiple sources outweighs the cost of a $20 a month subscription

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Claude Sonnet 5”

37. Given that the price remains the same as Sonnet 4.5, this is the first time I've been tempted to lower my default model choice.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Sonnet 4.6 System Card”

38. Regarding Sonnet 4.6, what I noticed is that the reasoning tokens are very different compared to any prior Anthropic models.

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Sonnet 4.6 System Card”

39. Looking at older README files I generated using Opus/Sonnet 4.5, its actually quite shocking how clear and concise they are.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “How my e-reader lost its stripes”

40. There is no point in using my mouse and keyboard to track down a file and then make the change when I can just use my voice

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Sonnet 5.5”