Claude Sonnet 5.5 Runs 30% Faster at the Same Price

Anthropic finished its 5.5 lineup's middle tier this week, and Sonnet 5.5 is the kind of upgrade most people will feel without changing a setting. Around it: Gemini's Gems turning into skills, a new ElevenLabs voice model, a Cloudflare CLI built for agents, and an open computer-use model you can run at home. Each one has a Reddit thread of people already trying it.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 runs faster at the same price

ModelConfirmed in r/singularity790 upvotesView thread

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 on September 28. The price per token is unchanged at $2 in and $10 out per million tokens, but Anthropic says it runs more than 30% faster and costs up to 30% less for most work because it needs fewer tokens to finish a job. Its own numbers show a large jump on agentic coding: 70.6% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, against 10.3% for Sonnet 5. It is live in the API as claude-sonnet-5-5 and on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, and Simon Willison notes it now powers the free tier on claude.ai. One catch: new cybersecurity safeguards can route higher-risk requests to Sonnet 5 instead.

On r/ClaudeCode, an early-impressions thread has a top reply calling it blazing fast: "Seconds, not minutes." Another commenter there says it drains usage limits faster than expected, and Willison saw its maximum thinking setting burn through 128,000 tokens and fail.

What to do: make it your everyday model, and stay below the max effort setting unless a task truly needs it.

Gemini skills replace Gems, with slash commands

FeatureConfirmed in r/GeminiAIView thread

Google is retiring Gems, the custom versions of Gemini people set up for repeat jobs, and replacing them with skills. According to Google's help page, you call a skill by typing "/" and its name in any chat, Gemini can also apply a relevant skill on its own, and you can keep up to 100 active. Skills were first limited to AI Pro and Ultra, but the page now lists them for anyone over 18 on a personal Google account. Android Authority reports that the free rollout had not reached its test account yet on September 29. Google will convert existing Gems automatically starting November 17 for personal accounts, March 2027 for Workspace business accounts and June 2027 for education. Skills don't yet work with Canvas or Deep Research.

The r/GeminiAI announcement thread drew more than 130 comments, including one from a reader who can't reach skills because Spark isn't offered in their country. In a separate post, one user describes moving three categories of Gems over by hand.

What to do: rebuild your most-used Gem as a skill now, before the automatic move.

Eleven v4 makes cloned voices more expressive

ModelConfirmed in r/ElevenLabsView thread

ElevenLabs shipped Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo on September 28. The standard model is tuned for quality and long-form narration; Turbo is for voice agents, with a median inference time of about 100 milliseconds and about 150 milliseconds before speech starts. Both cover more than 90 languages. An instant voice clone now needs only 10 seconds of audio, and you can direct delivery inline with tags such as [laughs] or a described tone. ElevenLabs claims about 75% of listeners preferred it in blind tests. It is available in the ElevenLabs app, its agent platform and the API, and the company lists a launch offer of 3x credits on Creator plans and up until October 12.

The r/ElevenLabs thread asking how v4 compares with v3 is mostly positive. The top reply says the commenter is "just kind of blown away" by hearing their own clone. Another warns that accented voices that worked on v3 come out sounding American on v4.

What to do: re-render one real script in v4 and compare it with v3 before switching, especially for accented voices.

Cloudflare's cf CLI puts its whole API in an agent's reach

ToolConfirmed in r/CloudFlareView thread

Cloudflare released cf on September 28 as an open beta: a command-line tool that covers more than 3,000 operations across the Cloudflare API, against roughly 280 commands in Wrangler, its current CLI. Output is JSON by default, condensed for agents and pretty-printed for people. A `cf cli search` command lets an agent find the right command in plain language, and project settings move into a TypeScript file, cloudflare.config.ts, that an agent can type-check. The code is open source and installs with `npm i -g cf`. This is also a signal about the future: Cloudflare says the final major version of Wrangler will point users to cf, with 18 months of maintenance after the beta ends.

The announcement landed on r/CloudFlare, and a Hacker News thread with 160 points debated whether a TypeScript CLI starts fast enough for agents that call it many times.

What to do: point your coding agent at cf on a test account and let it try a task Wrangler can't do. Keep Wrangler for production deploys until the beta ends.

Holo4 is an open computer-use model you can run locally

ModelConfirmed in r/LocalLLaMAView thread

French startup H Company released Holo4 on September 28: models that operate software through screens, code, MCP and APIs. There are two sizes: a 27B dense model built on Qwen3.8-27B and a 35B mixture-of-experts version with about 3B parameters active per step. H reports 61.7% on the OSWorld 2.0 benchmark for the 27B. That trails the 81.8% it lists for Claude Opus 5.5, but you can download it. Weights are on Hugging Face in BF16, FP8, NVFP4 and 4-bit GGUF. The catch is the license: the model card uses CC BY-NC 4.0, so no commercial use of the weights. For business use, the H API charges $0.40 in and $3 out per million tokens for the 27B.

On r/LocalLLaMA, the Holo4 thread shares the 27B GGUF and explains how it works: it sends screenshots and tool results to the model, then carries out the clicks it asks for.

What to do: if you build desktop automations, try the GGUF on a spare machine or VM, and use the API for anything commercial.

Quick answers

Is Claude Sonnet 5.5 free to use?

Yes, for chat: Sonnet 5.5 now powers the free tier on claude.ai, according to Simon Willison. In the API it costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, the same as Sonnet 5 (Anthropic).

What happens to my Gemini Gems?

Google will convert them into skills automatically, starting November 17, 2026 for personal accounts, March 2027 for Workspace business accounts and June 2027 for education accounts (Google). You can also recreate them as skills yourself before then.

Can I use Holo4 commercially?

Not the downloadable weights: they are released under the non-commercial CC BY-NC 4.0 license (Hugging Face). For commercial work, H Company sells access through its API.