I gave Claude's cheapest new model and a local Qwen the same coding jobs, and one of them is clearly the better deal

This month, Anthropic released its smallest model, Haiku 5.5, at a much lower price point, making it a potentially more cost-effective choice for local coding tasks. In a comparison between Haiku 5.5 and Qwen 3.5, Haiku consistently performed better on coding-related tasks, providing accurate explanations and solutions, while Qwen sometimes generated incorrect or irrelevant responses.

Both models were tested using the same coding problem - fixing a bug in Haiku 5.5's code base - and produced varying results. Haiku identified and resolved the issue more efficiently, providing a well-formatted final score and a thorough review of the code. In contrast, Qwen's output was inconsistent, often referring to unrelated concepts or generating unrelated content.

While Qwen did eventually pinpoint the bug, it failed to provide a correct solution. Despite Qwen's faster processing speed, Haiku's accuracy and improved code output made it the better choice for this particular coding task.