Claude Haiku 5.5 vs Sonnet 5.5 vs Opus 5.5: same prompt, same starting point
On 22 September, Claude Opus 5.5 built Planet Pop from one prompt, in 14 minutes for $2.54. On 29 September we gave Claude Sonnet 5.5 exactly the same spot. Claude Haiku 5.5 just came out, so it gets the same spot too: the same instructions and notes Opus had loaded that day, the same message, and the same lookups Opus had already made before it wrote any code, word for word. 4 runs, each a fresh one-shot: new session, empty folder, no memory of the other runs.
output a ThreeJS 3D cartoony/comics-like planet, with vibrant life on it: clouds, mountains, city buildings, cars and plane romaing it. It should be possible to orbit around and zoom and see the details. No harness is to be used
Time and cost
Measured from each session's own log (every request to the model), priced at Anthropic list rates.
| Run | Time | Requests | Output tokens | List price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Opus 5.5, 22 Sept (Planet Pop) | 14.0 min | 15 | 56.6k | $2.54 | one live session |
| Sonnet 5.5, average of 4 | 11.2 min | 11.5 | 64.9k | $1.51 | 7.0 to 15.2 min, $1.16 to $1.86 |
| Haiku 5.5, average of 4 | 5.3 min | 9.8 | 48.1k | $0.34 | 3.1 to 7.2 min, $0.27 to $0.42 |
| Haiku 5.5, run 1 | 5.9 min | 13 | 53.3k | $0.40 | playable |
| Haiku 5.5, run 2 | 3.1 min | 3 | 43.9k | $0.27 | playable |
| Haiku 5.5, run 3 | 7.2 min | 15 | 57.6k | $0.42 | playable |
| Haiku 5.5, run 4 | 4.9 min | 8 | 37.7k | $0.28 | playable |
Haiku 5.5 cost 13% of Opus 5.5 and 23% of Sonnet 5.5 ($0.34 vs $2.54 vs $1.51 per planet). Sonnet's 4 runs: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4.
Correction: our 29 Sept page priced Sonnet 5.5's cache reads at $0.20 per million; the list price is $0.10. Sonnet's average is $1.51, not $1.69.
Play them
Drag to spin, scroll or pinch to zoom.
Other Haiku runs: run 1 · run 2 · run 4
Same camera, every planet
Left to right: Opus 5.5, then Haiku 5.5 runs 1 to 4, captured by the same automatic check on a GPU.
Sonnet 5.5's 4 runs under the same camera: afar · another angle · zoomed in.
Our take
- Price and speed: Haiku 5.5 built a complete planet for about one seventh of Opus 5.5's cost and under a quarter of Sonnet 5.5's, in about half Sonnet's time.
- It always works: 4 of 4 runs gave a playable planet with land, mountains, clouds, planes and cars, and no errors.
- Look: plain next to the other two. No comic ink, towns small or hard to find, and zooming all the way in shows bare ground or water in all 4 runs (Opus lands you in a forest). Run 3 is the best: 6 towns, 21 cars, 1,600 trees. Runs 1, 2 and 4 are mostly empty land up close.
- It checks its work less: run 2 used 3 requests in total and shipped; the others looked at their page a few times.
- Ranking on looks: Opus, then Sonnet, then Haiku. On price and speed, the reverse, by a wide margin.
Tech stack
All are one self-contained HTML file using three.js from jsDelivr: no framework, no build step.
| Page | three.js | Post-processing | Custom shaders | Instanced meshes | Shadows | Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Opus 5.5 · Planet Pop | 0.170.0 | yes | 5 | 12 | yes | 47 KB |
| Haiku 5.5 · run 1 | 0.160.1 | no | 0 | 1 | no | 16 KB |
| Haiku 5.5 · run 2 | 0.160.0 | no | 0 | 3 | yes | 14 KB |
| Haiku 5.5 · run 3 | 0.160.1 | no | 0 | 3 | no | 17 KB |
| Haiku 5.5 · run 4 | 0.160.1 | no | 0 | 1 | no | 15 KB |
What this does not show
- Opus has one run (the original 22 September session); Sonnet and Haiku have four each.
- Live session vs one-shot: Opus worked in a live Claude Code session; each Sonnet and Haiku run was a one-shot Claude Code call carrying the same context, effort high. They also had one extra rule: only write files in their own folder.
- Tool version: Haiku ran on Claude Code 2.1.293 (the first version that knows Haiku 5.5); Sonnet ran on 2.1.284.
- Not blind, no real-GPU frame rate measured, not tested on a phone. Needs internet (three.js from jsDelivr).
Made by OhMyUnicorn Forge: describe an app in plain words, get a live URL.