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Elyra 0.9.42: Opus 5.5 Is the New Default

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5, and Elyra now uses it as the default model. Why we switched, what it costs you, and how to keep Sonnet 5.

Elyra 0.9.42: Opus 5.5 Is the New Default

This is a small release with one decision in it. Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 on Sunday. On Monday we made it Elyra's default model. Here is why, what it costs you, and how to say no.

What arrived

Opus 5.5 appeared in Anthropic's model list on 21 September. Within a day it was on Bedrock in every region, on Vertex, on OpenRouter with a half-price :batch variant, and on Vercel's AI Gateway with a -fast variant. Elyra's model registry pulls from three of those sources, so a single regeneration picked up all ten provider entries at once.

The spec sheet:

Opus 5.5 Context 1M tokens Output 128k tokens Input / output $4 / $20 per million Cache read / write $0.20 / $5 per million Capabilities reasoning, tool calling, text + image + PDF

Two things in that table matter more than the rest. The cache read price is the same as Sonnet 5's. And the whole thing is cheaper than Opus 5, which was $5/$25 with a $0.50 cache read. Anthropic moved the flagship down in price, not up.

Why we changed the default

Elyra's Anthropic default had been Sonnet 5 since June: $2/$10, fast, and good enough for the large majority of turns. Opus was the model you picked on purpose, for the hard problem, with /model.

Three things changed the calculation.

The price gap narrowed. Opus 5 was 2.5x Sonnet's input price and 2.5x the cache-read price. Opus 5.5 is 2x on input and output, and 1x on cache reads. On a session where most of the prompt is cached history, which is the normal shape of a long coding session, the effective premium is well under double.

The last release made cache reads the common case. In 0.9.41 we stopped throwing the cache away when tools were toggled, and we added warm pings so a five-minute pause no longer triggers a full rewrite. Both of those were built to make the input side of the bill mostly cache reads. Opus 5.5 pricing rewards exactly that shape.

The default is what most people use. Smart routing already sent the hardest turns to Sonnet 5 as its "powerful" tier, because Opus 5 was too expensive to pin there for everyone. With 5.5 that objection weakens. If the powerful tier is going to be an Opus model, the plain default should be too; otherwise you get the odd situation where routing upgrades you to something the default never offered.

So: Opus 5.5 is now the default for anthropic, amazon-bedrock, and cloudflare-ai-gateway, and the smart-routing powerful tier is pinned to anthropic/claude-opus-5-5.

What it costs you

Honest numbers. A turn that sends 50k uncached tokens and gets 2k back:

Sonnet 5 Opus 5.5 Input $0.100 $0.200 Output $0.020 $0.040 Turn $0.12 $0.24

Double. That is the worst case: first turn of a session, nothing cached.

The same turn ten minutes into a session, where 45k of those 50k tokens are cached history:

Sonnet 5 Opus 5.5 Cache read (45k) $0.009 $0.009 New input (5k) $0.010 $0.020 Output $0.020 $0.040 Turn $0.039 $0.069

About 1.8x. Push the cached fraction higher, which cache warming does for you, and it keeps falling.

/session shows you the running total, and /cost breaks it down. If the number surprises you after a day, the next section is for you.

How to keep Sonnet 5

Nothing about existing sessions changes; they keep whatever model they were on. New sessions without an explicit model pick up the new default. To opt out:

{
  "defaultProvider": "anthropic",
  "defaultModel": "claude-sonnet-5",
  "smartRoutingModels": {
    "powerful": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-5"
  }
}

in ~/.elyra/agent/settings.json (or the project's .elyra/settings.json to pin it per repo). Or just /model claude-sonnet-5 when you start a session; Elyra remembers the last choice as your default.

You can also go the other way and keep Sonnet as default but let routing escalate to Opus 5.5 only for the hard turns. That was the pre-5.5 arrangement, inverted:

{
  "defaultModel": "claude-sonnet-5",
  "smartRouting": true,
  "smartRoutingModels": {
    "powerful": "anthropic/claude-opus-5.5"
  }
}

With this, quick questions and file reads stay on Sonnet, and the router hands the multi-file refactor to Opus.

If you are on OpenRouter

The default there is unchanged (moonshotai/kimi-k3), but Opus 5.5 is in the list as anthropic/claude-opus-5.5. The :batch variant is worth knowing about: same model, half the price, higher latency. Elyra's goalBatchModels setting routes budgeted /goal runs to :batch variants automatically when one exists. For a long unattended task that is a 50% discount for waiting a bit longer.

Everything else in the refresh

The registry regeneration that brought in Opus 5.5 also picked up Grok 4.7, Xiaomi's MiMo v2.6 family (pro, flash, and an "ultraspeed" variant), GLM 5.3, and Tencent's Hy4 preview. OpenRouter dropped anthropic/claude-opus-4 and a handful of :batch variants for older models. None of these changed any default.

Upgrade

npm install -g @elyracode/coding-agent@latest
or
elyra update

Start a new session, ask it something hard, and check /cost afterwards. If the premium is not buying you anything on your kind of work, the settings above take thirty seconds. If it is, you just got a better model for less than the old one cost.

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