Claude Sonnet 5.5 for code review: More catches than Sonnet 5, in half the time

CodeRabbit’s evaluation of Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5.5 finds that the model improves materially over Sonnet 5 for automated code review, catching 6 of 13 difficult known issues versus 4 at roughly the same actionable-comment precision, while completing reviews in about half the time and using approximately 60% less model-call cost. In a broader unjudged run across 44 open-source pull requests, Sonnet 5.5 generated 24% fewer comments and fewer nitpicks than Sonnet 5, with average review time falling from 13:31 to 6:33. The analysis attributes these gains largely to lower input and output token use, despite unchanged API pricing, and finds that adaptive thinking enabled slightly better detection and precision than thinking disabled without increasing latency. Sonnet 5.5 remains weaker than Claude Opus 5.5 on the hardest cases, where Opus caught 8 to 10 of 13 issues, but the review concludes that Sonnet 5.5 offers a stronger balance of speed, cost, coverage, and comment quality for routine pull-request reviews. The authors emphasize that the 13-case benchmark is small and that broader quality results remain pending, recommending teams test the model against known outcomes in their own repositories.

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