TL;DR


Three flash-tier coding models are competing for your API budget right now: Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash (May 19, 2026), Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 (the reigning budget pick since October 2025), and Microsoft's MAI-Code-1-Flash (June 2, 2026). Haiku wins on output cost at $5/M tokens and structured output reliability. Gemini 3.5 Flash leads...