The interesting pattern with these Sonnet bumps: the practical gap between Sonnet and Opus keeps shrinking. At $3/15 per million tokens vs whatever Opus 4.6 costs, the question for most teams is no longer "which model is smarter" but "is the delta worth 10x the price."

For agent workloads specifically, consistency matters more than peak intelligence. A model that follows your system prompt correctly 98% of the time beats one that's occasionally brilliant but ignores instructions 5% of the time. The claim about improved instruction following is the most important line in the announcement if you're building on the API.

The computer use improvements are worth watching too. We're at the point where these models can reliably fill out a multi-step form or navigate between tabs. Not flashy, but that's the kind of boring automation that actually saves people time.

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skybrian 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

Looking the pricing page, Sonnet 4.6 seems to be about 60% the price of Opus 4.6. What am I missing?

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing

	▲	Arifcodes 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Fair point on the sticker price. The ratio shifts when you factor in cache read costs on long contexts. Sonnet 4.6 cache reads are $0.30/MTok vs Opus 4.6 at $1.50/MTok - a 5x difference that matters a lot on repeated agentic runs or RAG pipelines where the same large context gets reused. For single-shot short prompts you are right, the gap is not that dramatic. For anything with a warm cache it closes fast.