Claude Opus 5.5 Review: Easier to Steer, Fewer Tokens

Nate B. Jones (0:00)

Opus 5.5 makes me want to give Claude more work. The writing is so much easier to steer in this model. The three-dimensional work that Opus does is extraordinary. I'm going to show it in this video. And what I'm starting to pay a lot more attention to is something Opus shines at. How many tokens it takes to get a task done. I'm seeing tremendous improvement there, especially with visuals. Opus 5.5 turned my beanie hat logo into a 514-piece Lego model. My plan works out to roughly 50 bucks a week. A task uses about 1% of my weekly allowance, a task I will show you in this video. It's a complicated one. That's 50 cents of the subscription I'm actually paying for. So in this video, I'm going to show you the calculation, the work behind it, a sample Lego build, because we're going to have fun. And most importantly, I'm going to show you how to figure out whether you're getting that improvement on your own tasks. So let's get into it and how it works. Think about what you're paying for when you use a model. There is a price for the tokens, the chunks of information it processes and generates. But how many times does it need to read the files to do that? How many attempts does an AI make to make a change that you care about? How many times do you have to keep explaining again and again?

How many times does it churn out? All of that is part of getting the job done.

So when a model gets the job done efficiently, the price of what you're getting done can go way, way, way down. Now, I get it. This gets really squishy, really fast. Your tasks are not my tasks. You could spend all day with exactly the same model and get a very different result because you're asking it to do different work and models are spiky. That's what I want to get into with 5.5 in this video. How you can figure out what the efficiency gain is worth to you. So look at this. It's my logo in Lego. Say that five times fast. It has the beanie, it has the glasses, it has a clear column that holds up the glasses and the hat over a nice base. Now, I'm a Lego guy and I like beanie, so of course this is what I want to make. You can watch the pieces come together in the video and then see the finished model from the front and it lines up with the logo. It's beautifully put together. And look what came with it. There's a 63-page instruction booklet with 58 different build steps. It shows which parts to add and even tells you when a piece has to attach from underneath. It gave me a model file, a parts list, and a brick link wanted list. I can order it all. The model and the list both agree this is a 514-piece build.

That's a lot of work. Do you want to guess how many tokens that was? It was 89 million tokens. Do you want to guess how much of my CLAWD usage that took up with Opus 5.5? This is all Opus 5.5. 1% of my weekly usage for that. And those 89 million tokens, they would have cost me at least $44 if I was at API pricing. I didn't have to pay that $44. And by the way, if you do the math on a $200 a month subscription, we're talking about 25% roughly of the subscription price, but I didn't have to pay that. And it only took 1% of my usage for a week. And for all of that value, I get multiple files. I showed you a video file. I talked about the parts. I talked about the instructions. I also got a whole check file that checks the geometric connections between bricks.

And I got an LDRAW file that actually makes sure that the Legos can connect and get put together. And this gets at a larger pathway that I think is under-discussed, that Anthropic is actively using when it comes to AI development. And that is using code to do visual work. So what does all of this cost? Opus 5.5 charges $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. Those rates are 20% below Opus 5 They're also 60% below Fable 5.1's $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.

So we are seeing significant decreases for really, really solid intelligence that in many ways mirrors what Fable can do on ordinary tasks, but is much more efficient and much cheaper ultimately. And so these are useful baseline numbers, but it's important to know how much the model choose on those tokens to actually do the job. This is where that task efficiency comes in. Now, Anthropic says typical workloads cost about 40% less on Opus 5 from a combination of lower prices, and of course, the model using fewer tokens to get the work done. So keep that in your head, right? 40% less cost doesn't tell you that a task used 40% fewer tokens. Instead, think of it as input, output, cash, context, those all have different token rates, and ultimately, to understand the efficiency improvement, you are going to need to look at the token usage across all of those buckets, as well as the API bill, and then look, if you're a subscriber, at how that chews up your usage. But the 40% seems plausible. Other users are pointing to this same kind of savings, the same kind of efficiency that I'm showing you here. In the report's Anthropic features in its announcement, GitHub and Lovable both describe Opus using fewer steps with 5.5, and Spotify describes doing the same tasks more cheaply and quickly.