Claude Sonnet 5 Setup Guide

The practical setup for effort levels, Claude Code, prompts, workflows, and lower API costs

Claude Sonnet 5 Setup Guide

TL;DR

  • Sonnet 5 is designed for continuous tasks like file inspection, tool operation, and command execution.
  • It can perform many tasks that previously required the more expensive Opus model.
  • Sonnet 5 features adaptive thinking, five effort levels, a 1-million-token context window, and stronger tool use.
  • It is now the default model for Claude Free and Pro users, and available via API.
  • Pricing for Sonnet 5 is $2/1M input tokens and $10/1M output tokens until September 1, 2026, after which it increases to $3/$15.
  • The recommended approach is to start with Sonnet, increase effort for difficult tasks, and only move to Opus when necessary.
  • Improvements over Sonnet 4.6 are noted in coding and agentic tasks.