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Brief on Claude 4 Lineup

Anthropic released Claude 4 on May 22, which comes in two variants: Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4.

The first one, Claude Opus 4, is claimed to be the best AI model for coding, and Claude Sonnet 4 is an improved model over Claude 3.7 Sonnet (a drop-in replacement for Claude 3.7 Sonnet).

Claude Sonnet 4 is a generalist model that's great for most use cases and is not limited to any specific workflow. The best part is this model is free, but with limited prompts (of course!). 👀

The other one, Claude Opus 4, is mainly designed for reasoning-heavy tasks, like agentic workflows, and that includes long-running workflows.

That seems to be true as well, as Claude Opus 4 leads on the SWE benchmark.

But do you think this is going to stay there for long? Obviously not! Another model is going to take this spot pretty soon, within a month or so, but at least we can claim that this model, Claude Opus 4, is the best coding model in the world as of now. 😮‍💨

Another improvement in the Claude 4 lineup is that it has a 65% lower chance of using hacky and shortcut methods to get the job done.

Claude Sonnet 4

Claude Sonnet 4, as I said earlier, is a generalist model that performs well across most of the common tasks you'll use AI for, like coding, writing, math, and any others you can think of.

This is also available to free users, which is unusual for a model of this capability, but maybe the same reason Claude 3.7 Sonnet was given for free.

This is a smaller model in the Claude 4 lineup and surprisingly only supports up to a 200K context window, which makes it pretty suitable for real-world use cases with longer interactions.

It has around 64K output tokens, which helps with longer outputs and large code completions.

But that low context window comes with limitations. It's fair to say that this model might not be able to handle very large codebases.

Nowadays, even some basic models come with a context window of about 1M tokens.

This is a drop-in replacement for the Claude 3.7 Sonnet with some improvements, like being a bit faster and also a bit more reliable.

Claude Opus 4

Claude Opus 4 is the main highlight of the Claude 4 lineup and is the best coding model. It is built for tasks that require deep reasoning, and long term memory.

It is also said that this model could autonomously work for a full corporate day (seven hours). 🤯

Similar to Claude Sonnet 4, this model features a 200K token context window. Looking at the number, it might seem doubtful whether it can manage a large, real-world codebase, right? Yes you could run into issues, but, I've used this model in my workflow and have had no real issues.

You can also use this model with "extended thinking", which allows it to think properly before coming to the answer. This ability gives this model features like using tools and summarizing its thought process.

Unlike the Claude Sonnet 4, this is not a free model and is only available in paid plans. It's a fairly expensive model as well, with $15/M input tokens and $75/M output tokens, so for simple use cases, this model could be a bit overkill, and you are better off with a model like Gemini 2.5 Pro. But for complex use cases, this could be your perfect model of choice. 🚀

Benchmark Comparison

Here's the official benchmark that Anthropic released for the Claude 4 lineup:

Claude Sonnet 4

As you can see above, Claude Sonnet 4 performs exceptionally well, especially considering that it's available for free users. It scores 72.7% in the SWE benchmark, which is over a 10% improvement over its predecessor, Claude 3.7 Sonnet:

Here are some other benchmarks you might be interested in:

You can never go wrong choosing this model, and it is probably the best model you can pick from free-tier models, even better than some paid models available.

Claude Opus 4

As I said earlier, it's the best model in the Claude 4 lineup for coding. It nearly surpasses all the benchmarks, and the most important one is the SWE benchmark, where it scores 72.5% and reaches up to 79.4% with parallel test-time compute.

Here are some other benchmarks you might be interested in:

Quick Coding Test

For this Claude 4 lineup, it's mainly interesting to see how they compare in coding.

Let's do one quick coding test with a somewhat tough question and see how both models handle it and if Claude Opus 4 can do the job better than Sonnet 4.

Panda Launcher

Prompt: Build a Mario-style 2D platformer in one HTML file using JavaScript. Include player movement, animated tiles, enemies like Goombas, coins, and a flagpole to end levels.

Output: Claude Sonnet 4

It got it somewhat working, but there are some issues I can notice. It didn't follow the prompt properly and added some stuff that was not asked for and struggled a bit with the implementation. The game goes completely empty after crossing a certain point, and there is no way the game ends!

It has tried to come up with a working solution, but it's not quite there yet.

Output: Claude Opus 4

This looks crazy good for one shot and is a lot more functional and looks like a real game. It's actually a working game, and the game ends properly.

The overall game finish also looks a lot nicer than Claude Sonnet 4.

⚠️ NOTE: One question cannot decide whether a model is good or bad. In this case, Claude Sonnet 4 struggled and might even do better than Opus 4 in some cases, as they have somewhat similar SWE benchmarks. I've added this quick test just to give you a brief idea of their coding abilities.

When to use one over the other?

Now you know each model's capabilities, let's take a look at situations where you'd want to prefer one over the other. 🤔

Claude Sonnet 4 is super fast, and mainly free to use and does exceptional work with all the common tasks you might need help with AI.

For most of your tasks unless you go super hard on coding questions, this model might be all you need.

Claude Opus 4, is the best model when it comes to coding, but that does not mean, that you should use it for all your use cases. It comes with a cost, so make sure that you don't overuse this model and especially on the tasks that are pretty naive and Claude Sonnet 4 can handle.

Just use this model, when there is a high demand on the deep reasoning and complex coding workflows.

Conclusion

In short, the Claude 4 lineup is a great help with everything AI-related and offers options for everyone. For someone who doesn't do tech and mainly uses it for day-to-day tasks, Claude Sonnet 4 is a great option, and for someone in tech, Claude Opus 4 is an excellent choice.

Unlike other coding models, these AI models are very good with everything despite having such a low context window, which is quite unusual (but it is what it is!)