✦ Our pick · Infra, DevOps & scripting
GPT-6.1 Sol at medium effort, $4.44 per finished task, is the cheapest you can get today. Within our measurement error it ties with Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Claude Haiku 5.5 and Ling 3.1 Flash: equally good bets, worth trying two.
Updated Oct 13, 2026, every 3 hours. See it live with your plans and costs.
The top 10 for infra, devops & scripting
CI/CD, containers, shell, builds and environment setup. Cost per finished task: the tokens at each model's best effort level for this work, plus your time fixing failed attempts ($93 an hour). Success is the share of such tasks a model gets right the first time, on the benchmarks below.
| # | Model | Effort | Success | $/task |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GPT-6.1 Sol OpenAI | medium | 90.2% partly measured | $4.44 |
| 2 | Claude Opus 5.5 Anthropic | medium | 92.2% partly measured | $4.74 |
| 3 | Claude Sonnet 5.5 Anthropic | xhigh | 92.0% partly measured | $4.82 |
| 4 | Gemini 4 Argon Google | high | 90.7% partly measured | $5.03 |
| 5 | Claude Haiku 5.5 Anthropic | max | 86.1% partly measured | $5.31 |
| 6 | Ling 3.1 Flash InclusionAI | default | 85.5% partly measured | $5.46 |
| 7 | MiMo-V2.6-Pro Xiaomi | default | 85.3% partly measured | $5.56 |
| 8 | Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Alibaba | default | 85.0% measured | $5.58 |
| 9 | GLM-5.3-Flash Z AI | default | 84.9% measured | $5.64 |
| 10 | Qwen3.8 Max (0902) Alibaba | default | 87.3% measured | $5.99 |
Best within your tool
| Tool | Model | Effort | $/task |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cursor | Claude Opus 5.5 | medium | $4.74 |
| Claude Code | Claude Opus 5.5 | medium | $4.74 |
| Codex | GPT-6.1 Sol | medium | $4.44 |
| Antigravity | Claude Opus 5.5 | medium | $4.74 |
| GitHub Copilot | GPT-6.1 Sol | medium | $4.44 |
If tokens come with your plan
Tokens included in a plan cost you nothing extra, so the pick is the most reliable model in it, at the leanest effort level within our error of the best (the top levels only use up the plan sooner).
| Plan | Model | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Pro | Claude Opus 5.5 | high |
| Claude Max | Claude Opus 5.5 | high |
| ChatGPT Plus or Business | GPT-6.1 Sol | medium |
| ChatGPT Pro | GPT-6.1 Sol | medium |
| Google AI Pro | Claude Opus 5.5 | high |
| Google AI Ultra | Claude Opus 5.5 | high |
Measured on
- Terminal-Bench v2.1 · Artificial Analysis (tbench.ai tasks). 89 tasks in a real terminal: system administration, builds, environments, data processing, security. Measured for 27 of the 42 ranked models.
- Terminal-Bench 4.0 · Vals AI; models it hasn't run filled in from Artificial Analysis. 66 hard tasks in a real terminal: system administration, builds, environments, debugging, data processing. Measured for 39 of the 42 ranked models, results as of Oct 13, 2026.
How every number is worked out, with the errors of our estimates: the method.