If Claude is the car, the models are the engines. Different engines for different terrain.

What's the difference between Opus, Sonnet and Haiku?

  • Haiku: the fastest and lightest. Quick summaries and simple answers.
  • Sonnet: the everyday engine. Most writing, analysis and business tasks.
  • Opus: the heavy engine. Big jobs, like when I had Claude read 17 meeting transcripts and pull out 93 content ideas.

Which Claude model should I use?

Start with a cheaper model to save your usage. If Claude's slow or the result isn't good enough, upgrade. Think of it like hiring: you give a simple task to anyone on the team and the complex one to your A player.

Do the version numbers matter?

New versions come out every few weeks. The tiers stay the same, so learn which tier fits which job and use the newest version of it.