Anthropic has just released Claude Sonnet 5 for all users, and I wanted to test what it was good at. But the game has changed now. Sonnet 5 doesn't feel dramatically different from Gemini or ChatGPT if you ask it ordinary chatbot questions. Instead, the difference should show up when you stop asking for answers and start asking for completed work.
Anthropic says Sonnet 5 is built for "multi-step software engineering work," sustained coding, tool use, debugging, and "messy technical contexts." It also says it can make plans, use browsers and terminals, and run more autonomously than smaller, cheaper models previously could.
