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Opus 5.5 on Low seems smarter, cheaper, and faster than sonnet on medium, so what's the point of sonnet?

Claude Code has the issue that sub agents inherit the thinking level. This means that to use a smarter or dumber sub agent you need a different model. That's not a particularly good reason, but that's my one use case for Sonnet.

Or just use a better harness.

You can also create custom agents with defined effort levels and use those.

It's now my head canon that it was easier for Anthropic to train a new model than to add a thinking level option to Claude Code.

Being that my first prompt can be something like: for task x/issue y, which model would strike the best balance between cost and capability…

It seems like it would be a better UX to have model and effort selection asked into the system. Of course, I’m not sure in practice if that would be in the best interests of the providers and/or users.

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