When should you choose Claude Sonnet 5 over Claude Opus 5 for a coding task?

Choose Sonnet 5 for high-volume, well-scoped coding work - routine bug fixes, test generation, straightforward refactors, and feature builds - where the task doesn't require deep multi-file architectural reasoning and where per-request cost adds up meaningfully at scale.

Sonnet 5 has also been reported to perform strongly, and in some specific benchmarks even favorably compared to Opus 4.8, on everyday coding tasks, which supports using it as a first-line default for common coding work rather than reserving Opus-class models exclusively for that purpose.

The signal to escalate to Opus 5 instead is typically task-shape, not task-category: complex multi-file refactors, long-running agentic coding sessions, or debugging that spans many files and requires holding more architectural context in mind tend to be where Opus 5's deeper reasoning capability actually pays for itself.

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