Claude Haiku 4.5
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-haiku-4-5
The updated Haiku model, known for being fast and cheap, now matches the code generation performance of the previous-gen Sonnet 4, while being twice as fast (160-220 tokens/sec) and three times less expensive.

Most will use an architectural approach: using a smarter model (e.g., Sonnet 4.5) as an "orchestrator" that breaks down a complex problem into smaller subtasks. These subtasks are then executed in parallel by a "team" of several Haiku 4.5s.

Haiku 4.5 appears to make code changes significantly more accurately compared to GPT-5 models.

Skills for Claude Models
https://www.anthropic.com/news/skills
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/
Essentially, "Agent Skills" are a folder containing onboarding, instructions, resources, and executable code. This allows Claude to be trained for specialized tasks, such as working with internal APIs, or adhering to coding standards. Integrated into all Claude products, a new /v1/skills API endpoint has appeared for management. In Claude Code, they can be installed as plugins from the marketplace or manually by adding them to the ~/.claude/skills folder.

Simon Willison believes the new feature is a huge breakthrough, potentially more important than the MCP protocol. Unlike MCP, which is a complex protocol, a Skill is just a folder with a Markdown file containing instructions and optional scripts. This approach doesn't invent new standards but relies on the existing ability of LLM agents to read files and execute code, making it incredibly flexible and intuitive. Since they are simple files, they are easy to create and share.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHg1TfSNSFI

Compared to MCP, Skills have a key advantage in token efficiency: instead of loading thousands of tokens to describe tools, the model reads only a brief description of the skill, and loads the full instructions only when needed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45607117
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45619537
Many commentators note that Skills are essentially just a way to dynamically add instructions to the model's context when needed. Their proponents say that this simplicity is precisely the genius. Skills represent a new paradigm for organizing and dynamically assembling context. Everyone generally agrees that this is a more successful and lightweight alternative to MCP, which saves us from context overload and consuming thousands of tokens.

Users have noticed that Skills are essentially a formalization of an existing AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md) pattern, where instructions for an agent are collected in one file, telling it where to look when something is needed. But Skills make this process more standardized, organized, and scalable. The LLM knows the standard and can help in generating a Skill.

#newllmmodel #mcp #agentskills