I Tried NEW Sonnet 5.5 on 27 Coding Prompts

Summary
Povilas Korop of AI Coding Daily reviews Anthropic’s newly released Claude Sonnet 5.5 by running it through his standardized multi-project coding benchmark suite across different reasoning effort levels. He demonstrates the benchmark runs, analyzes the resulting scores and costs on his LLM Coding Leaderboard, tests bug-hunting capabilities on a Laravel project, and compares the model's speed and pricing against Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI models.

What is shown

• [00:00 - 01:05] Official launch posts on X from Anthropic and Addy Osmani announcing Claude Sonnet 5.5 (>30% faster, up to 30% cheaper).
• [00:15 - 00:35] Previous leaderboard standings showing the older Claude Sonnet 5 ranked #42 out of 55 with 44.55 points ($0.79 / 3:29 per prompt).
• [01:10 - 02:34] Terminal benchmark execution on Laravel offline-sync, Dart/Flutter transaction feed, and Go shipping-quote projects using claude-sonnet-5-5 on "medium" effort, showing runtimes under 1 minute and costs around $0.13–$0.25 per prompt.
• [02:55 - 03:12] Terminal benchmark execution on "high" effort (effort=high), showing ~2-minute execution times, zero failed tests, and costs around $0.29–$0.35.
• [03:58 - 04:25] Updated LLM Coding Leaderboard (September 29th, 2026):
  • Sonnet 5.5 (High): Rank #4, 56.18 points, $0.34 average cost, 1:53 average time.
  • Sonnet 5.5 (Medium): Rank #10, 53.46 points, $0.20 average cost, 0:58 average time.
• [06:40 - 07:44] Testing the experimental xhigh effort level on terminal runs; runtimes increase to ~5–6 minutes and costs rise to $0.80–$1.57.
• [07:57 - 08:22] Devin interface showing model selection where Devin sets Claude Sonnet 5.5 High as the default reasoning level.
• [08:23 - 08:51] Terminal evaluation of effort=low, showing negligible cost or time savings compared to medium, but lower test pass rates.
• [10:17 - 10:48] Posts on X from Kun Chen and the official @claudeai account announcing Claude Haiku 5.5 arriving in the coming weeks.
• [11:58 - 13:30] A new "Bug Hunt Leaderboard" evaluation prompt (audit-v2.md) and results table: Opus 5.5 leads at 81.3, while Sonnet 5.5 (Medium) scores 68.8 (13/16 natural bugs, 3/5 planted bugs, 17 findings) in 2:05 at $0.63.

Claims & numbers

• Anthropic states Sonnet 5.5 runs over 30% faster and costs up to 30% less than Sonnet 5 for most work (quoted at [00:54]).
• On the presenter's leaderboard, Sonnet 5 previously scored 44.55 points, costing $0.79 with a 3:29 average runtime [00:24].
• Testing 24 prompts on medium effort consumed only ~30% of the 5-hour rate limit on the $20 Anthropic plan [02:35].
• On the refreshed leaderboard (September 29, 2026), Sonnet 5.5 (High) achieved 56.18 points ($0.34 / 1:53 prompt average), ranking 4th behind Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra [04:06].
• Sonnet 5.5 (Medium) achieved 53.46 points ($0.20 / 0:58 prompt average), becoming the first model on his leaderboard to break the under-1-minute average completion threshold [04:12, 05:15].
• On xhigh effort, runtimes jumped to 5:22–6:01 and costs rose to $0.81–$1.57, which the presenter claims falls off the Pareto frontier [07:11, 07:45].
• In the bug-hunting audit benchmark, Sonnet 5.5 placed third behind Opus 5.5 and Grok 4.6, taking 2:05 and costing $0.63 [12:50, 13:17].

Notable quotes

• "Sonnet 5.5 medium is the first model ever on my leaderboard to surpass under 1 minute average." [05:15]
• "Can you imagine that jump in quality? So Sonnet 5 was scoring like 2, 3 points out of 5... and the time was... it's incomparable." [04:28]
• "My overall approach now is: Opus plans, Sonnet implements... and then your role is to keep up with them with your ideas, prompting, and code review." [10:24]

Assessment
This is an authentic, independent benchmark review video demonstrating real evaluation runs and leaderboard data. The testing methodology across automated test suites, code quality grading, and bug-hunting audits is clearly displayed and fully executed on screen.

Described by gemini-3.8-flash on 2026-09-29 from the video's audio and frames.