Which AI model is best for coding? A hands-on comparison
A hands-on comparisonBy Flavio CopesSep 24, 2026Which AI model is best for coding? Claude Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Sol, Grok 4.7 and open models compared, plus a test you can run on your own code.~~~As of September 23, 2026, the best AI model for coding is Claude Opus 5.5. It sits at the top of Cursor’s coding leaderboard, it’s cheaper than Opus 5 was, and in the test we’ll build in this post it was the fastest model, and it got every hidden test right in three runs out of four.
- ▪A hands-on comparisonBy Flavio CopesSep 24, 2026Which AI model is best for coding?
- ▪Claude Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Sol, Grok 4.7 and open models compared, plus a test you can run on your own code.~~~As of September 23, 2026, the best AI model for coding is Claude Opus 5.5.
- ▪It sits at the top of Cursor’s coding leaderboard, it’s cheaper than Opus 5 was, and in the test we’ll build in this post it was the fastest model, and it got every hidden test right in three runs out of four.
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| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://flaviocopes.com/ai-coding-models/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:12:50 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-24T22:20:27.210Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-24T22:20:27.210Z |
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Home / AIWhich AI model is best for coding? A hands-on comparisonBy Flavio CopesSep 24, 2026Which AI model is best for coding? Claude Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Sol, Grok 4.7 and open models compared, plus a test you can run on your own code.~~~As of September 23, 2026, the best AI model for coding is Claude Opus 5.5. It sits at the top of Cursor’s coding leaderboard, it’s cheaper than Opus 5 was, and in the test we’ll build in this post it was the fastest model, and it got every hidden test right in three runs out of four. GPT-5.6 Sol is a close second for careful, well-specified changes, and it used the fewest tokens of any model I tried. GPT-6 Sol came out on September 22 and is the one to watch, but it wasn’t in Cursor yet when I ran these tests. That’s the short answer.
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