Unfortunately there's no defending Haiku 4.5 at this point when cheaper and better options are available.

TLDR:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?models=gemini-3-5-flash...

and: https://i.imgur.com/nTu3VCZ.png

For starters I did experiment a heck lot with models since Github Copilot gave me access to OpenAI, Gemini and Anthropic models. So I probably experimented more than the average LLMer. When GitHub Copilot had a generous quota I ran the same tasks with many models to compare them (and pursue best solution among them) quite often.

Now about my experience with Haiku, I think it was free for some time in GitHub Copilot, then it was 0.33x quota usage (when Sonnet was 1x and Opus was 3x, good times). I tried to use it for light coding for about a week.

In my tests I concluded that there was zero reason to use 0.33x priced Haiku in my coding workload because it constantly generated subpar solutions. Even when they worked, Sonnet at 1x and Opus at 3x quota usage had a lot less tech debt on average and my plan permitted continuous Sonnet/Opus usage for my workload, otherwise I would use Gemini Flash (the old one, not this 3.5 one) which was better than Haiku by a mile.

Then GPT 5.4 came at 1x quota usage and it was competitive with Opus at 3x quota usage. So I stopped using Opus in favor of GPT and by this time there was even less reason to use Haiku on my $39/mo GitHub Copilot plan.

And now we have DeepSeek v4 which is Sonnet+ levels in my tests because it has an actual 1 million token context window and their crazy alien caching tech (https://huggingface.co/blog/deepseekv4).

I urge you to throw $5 at OpenCode Go plan for 30 days and toy around with DeepSeek Flash on high setting (not max).

Or MiMo 2.5 Pro on the same OpenCode Go plan. 2 amazing models.