Summary
Theo reacts to the launch of Claude Haiku 5.5, which Anthropic bills as its cheapest, fastest and most capable small model, designed for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks. He explains why he had previously steered his agents away from Haiku 4.5, arguing that Anthropic had historically poured effort into its biggest models and weakly distilled the smaller ones, a pattern he says has been broken with Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5.
After walking through the announcement, he examines price-versus-intelligence charts that plot Haiku 5.5 against GPT-6 Luna, GPT 6.1 Soul, GPT6 Astra, Sonnet 5.5, Opus 5.5 and the open-weight Mimo V26 Pro. On the Pareto line, Luna, Soul and Opus offer the best raw value, but Haiku 5.5 is close behind, and Theo argues that staying within one provider’s model family, such as using Haiku for file search and change verification inside Claude Code, can still make it the sensible choice.
The video also includes a sponsor segment on CodeRabbit’s security reviews, and is a useful read for developers deciding which models to assign to subagent and high-volume coding tasks.
📺 Source: Theo – t3․gg · Published October 09, 2026
🏷️ Format: News Analysis
