Claude Code on Pro lists Haiku 5.5 as the recommended default

Claude Code v2.1.316 lists Haiku 5.5 as the “Default (recommended)” model in the /model menu of a Claude Pro account, albert_e showed in a November 1 Tell HN post on Ycombinator’s Hacker News. If your Pro sessions sit on Default and you hand Claude Code complex agentic coding, that work now goes to Anthropic’s small model, and moving it to Sonnet or Opus is a choice you make in /model.

The switch came before 2.1.316. Haiku 5.5 became the default in Claude Code 2.1.293, which shipped October 7 with a 1M context window. At the model’s launch, Anthropic still pointed hard agentic coding to Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5.

Earlier, on September 22, Claude Code 2.1.280 had moved the Pro and Team Standard default from Sonnet to Opus, “matching Max, Team Premium, and Enterprise,” MIXED News reported, in the same release that made Opus 5.5 the default Opus model.

In Claude Code’s docs, default is not a model alias: it is a special value that clears any model override and falls back to the runtime default for your account. A session where no one picked a model therefore runs on whatever that account default is, which on this Pro account is Haiku 5.5. The same docs describe the haiku alias as the fast, efficient model for simple tasks, and sonnet as the latest Sonnet for daily coding tasks.

On the API, Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, rising to $0.50 and $2.50 for prompts over 100K; Opus 5.5 runs $4 and $20, per MIXED News. On a subscription like Pro the cost shows up as usage allowance rather than dollars, and the outlet reported that Anthropic shares a session or weekly limit across every model.

To leave Default, pick a model in /model. Aliases point to the recommended version for your provider and update over time, so to hold a specific one the docs say to use the full model name, such as claude-opus-5-5, or set an environment variable like ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL.