Researched and written with 305,560 tokens (in 10 · out 25,537 · cache-read 63,775 · cache-create 216,238) across 5 Claude calls

Claude Haiku 5.5 launch

• Claude Haiku 5.5: cheapest, fastest small model from Anthropic, aimed at summaries, compactions, and classification, and meant as a subagent under Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5; HN pushes back that the 100K pricing cutoff is low enough that most real prompts pay the higher rate.
• Claude Haiku 5.5 (Simon Willison): Willison's take on the release, noting the previous Haiku 4.5 was almost a year old and showing its age.
• Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5: Anthropic claims about 75% lower average cost than Haiku 4.5.
• Haiku 5.5 tiered pricing: $0.10/$0.50 per Mtok under 100K tokens (cache reads $0.01), $0.50/$2.50 above 100K (cache reads $0.05).
• Haiku 5.5 under-100K value: Anthropic says about 90% of requests to the previous Haiku were under 100K tokens, so the cheap tier covers most workloads.
• Autocompact tip: on API billing, /model haiku then /autocompact 100k keeps Haiku 5.5 (and its subagents) in the cheaper tier, and the setting is saved per model.
• Sonnet 5.5 cache reads halved: cache reads drop to $0.10/Mtok, which Anthropic says makes Sonnet 5.5 about 20% cheaper on long-running work.
• Claude Haiku 5.5 in GitHub Copilot: GA in Copilot, pitched at subagents, quick edits, and terminal tasks.

Coding agents

• Claude Code v2.1.293: adds claude-haiku-5-5 (1M context) as the default Haiku, plus agentType in the subagentStatusLine payload so scripts can tell custom subagent types apart.
• Claude Code v2.1.294: fixes prompt and agent hooks written as instructions that failed to block what they should, and improves Stop/SubagentStop hook judging so Claude stops early less often.
• Local sandboxing for GitHub Copilot GA: local sandboxes are now GA in Copilot CLI, the Copilot app, and VS Code Agent Host sessions.
• Discover local models in GitHub Copilot CLI: from CLI 1.0.94-0, /model lists supported models from a running local server.
• MAI-Code-1.1-Flash local in Copilot: on-device model calls inside Copilot with no inference charge for local calls.
• Reika: coding agent CLI designed around small local models first.
• Opus 5.5 formal verification of the Agent SDK: Lean (and TLA+) prompts yielded 16 PRs fixing bugs and race conditions, a useful pattern for data-flow, concurrency, and state-management audits.
• theo on PR monitoring flows: argues that wasteful PR monitoring burns many tokens and hopes others copy their fix.

Agent tooling and skills

• oraios/serena: gives Claude Code symbol-level find and edit instead of whole-file reads or grep, cutting context spend.
• mq: jq-style query language for Markdown that extracts the smallest complete section for a task without an LLM reading the whole document.
• review-pr: review contract for agents that limits findings to correctness, security, lifecycle, error handling, tests, and demonstrated performance risks, and bans speculative warnings and style commentary.
• addyosmani/agent-skills: production-grade skills encoding senior-engineer workflows across define, plan, build, verify, review, and ship phases.
• shot-scraper video: shot-scraper 1.10 records Playwright videos from a storyboard.yml, so coding agents can produce demos of their work.
• Open skills directory: directory of reusable skills installable with one command into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Gemini.
• Swipe: Claude in plain English: roundup covering a plain-English rewriter plugin, an account-swapping menu bar app for rate limits, local agent memory, and a skill that stops agents quitting early.
• affaan-m/ECC: trending-repos roundup including Alibaba's Open Code Review, which combines deterministic pipelines with LLM agents.

CLI/TUI

• zerobrew: claims a 100x faster Homebrew alternative; skeptics say the speedup is a warm-cache number and ask why it isn't a PR to brew.