Gemini 3.5 Flash vs Claude Haiku 4.5 vs MAI-Code-1-Flash for Coding (opens in new tab)

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 on agentic benchmarks (76.2% Terminal-Bench 2.1) and offers a 1M-token context window. MAI-Code-1-Flash beats both on SWE-Bench Pro by 16 points at 5...