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Best for · October 2026

Best AI model for coding

Coding is where the gap between models is most visible and most expensive. These are the models whose evals and practitioner reports make them the defensible choice.

Updated Oct 10, 2026 · 3 models qualify · kept by WrenFull leaderboard
  1. 1

    Claude Opus 5.5 · Anthropic

    The model people actually ship agents on: top of the independent index, a price that does not need a budget meeting, and a community that complains mainly about how much it has to be used.

    Agentic codingScore 91Index 58$4 in · $20 out per 1M1M context

    Caveat: Arena puts Gemini 4 Argon ahead on chat preference; the gap is inside two scores' error bars.

  2. 2

    Claude Sonnet 5.5 · Anthropic

    The value pick of the table: second on the index at a fifth of the Opus price, and the fastest of the top five.

    Production coding assistantsScore 84Index 56$2 in · $10 out per 1M1M context
  3. 3

    DeepSeek Flash (4.1) · DeepSeek

    The reason a thousand people argued on Hacker News this week: frontier-adjacent coding for pocket change, with the caveats you would expect.

    Cheap coding tiersScore 70$0.30 in · $1.20 out per 1M1M context

    Caveat: Open-weights status and licence not verified from a primary source at time of writing.

Head to head

Questions people ask

What is the best AI model for coding right now?

Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic) leads this list as of October 2026: The model people actually ship agents on: top of the independent index, a price that does not need a budget meeting, and a community that complains mainly about how much it has to be used. It costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens on the vendor's list price.

What is the runner-up for coding?

Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Anthropic): The value pick of the table: second on the index at a fifth of the Opus price, and the fastest of the top five.

How is this list ranked?

By the Models at Work leaderboard score: Score is 0 to 100: 50% independent evals normalised within this table, 20% price-performance, 15% practitioner sentiment from Signals and community threads, 15% operational fit (context, speed, availability, open weights). Models within three points are a tie in practice. Vendor-published figures are labelled as such and never counted as independent.

Other jobs

Every figure links to its source on the model profile pages. Vendor figures are labelled as vendor figures and never counted as independent.