Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Hy4 Preview
Claude Sonnet 5.5 took 3 min 49 s and $0.34 at list price, Hy4 Preview took 34 min 52 s and $0.32 at list price. Hy4 Preview took 9.2× as long, and Claude Sonnet 5.5 cost 1.1× as much.
Claude Sonnet 5.5
Anthropic · $10.00/M out · 9 HN pts
Hy4 Preview
Tencent · $2.50/M out · 440 HN pts
Only Claude Sonnet 5.5 has CLI runs here (Claude Code).
Pelican
Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle
Watch
Draw a mechanical wristwatch that shows the current local time, with a sweeping seconds hand and a date window. Make it look expensive.
Landing
Build the landing page for Lumen Cycles, a Copenhagen workshop that builds custom cargo bikes to order. Make it look like a real brand you would trust with 4,000 euros.
Breakout
Make a Breakout game I can play right now with the keyboard or the mouse. Give it several levels, a score and some juice.
Logo
Design a logo for Night Heron, an independent bookshop that only opens after dark.
About
Write the opening of the About us page for Patchbay, a three-person studio in Rotterdam that repairs vintage synthesizers. About 150 words.
Patchbay is three people in a workshop in Rotterdam, trying to keep old synthesizers alive. We repair, restore and recalibrate the instruments that shaped electronic music: Moogs and Oberheims, Rolands and Sequential Circuits, the odd temperamental Soviet oddity that someone found in an attic.
Most of what lands on our benches has been silent for years. A crackling pot, a drifting oscillator, a power supply that gave up in 1994. Some come from working musicians who need their instrument back before the next tour. Others come from people who inherited a dusty box from a parent and want to hear what it sounds like.
We work slowly and by hand. We trace faults with a scope and a schematic, source or rebuild parts when originals are gone, and change as little as we can. Every synth leaves with a note describing exactly what we did, so the next person to open it knows where we have been.
Come by, bring your synth, and stay for coffee.
Patchbay is a three-person studio in Rotterdam with a very specific obsession: bringing vintage synthesizers back to life. We are three technicians and musicians who spend our days surrounded by circuit boards, calibration tapes, and the smell of solder, coaxing sound out of machines that have been silent for years. From wobbly oscillators and dead keys to crackling faders and drifting filters, we diagnose, repair, and restore analog instruments with the patience they deserve. Our workshop is stocked with rare spare parts, original service manuals, and a deep archive of hard-won knowledge about classics from Moog, Roland, Sequential, Korg, and ARP. We love these instruments not as museum pieces, but as living tools that still have music in them. Every synthesizer that leaves our bench is tested, played, and calibrated so it feels reliable enough for the stage, the studio, or the late-night jam that inspired it in the first place.
Specs and numbers
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Hy4 Preview | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Anthropic | Tencent |
| Made in | US | China |
| Released | 28 Sep 2026 | 28 Aug 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $2.00 | $0.834 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $10.00 | $2.50 |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Weights | closed | open |
| Hacker News points | 9 | 440 |
| Time for the six prompts | 3 min 49 s | 34 min 52 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.34 | $0.32 |
Hy4 Preview was cheaper: $0.018 less at list price, and less on 2 of the 6 prompts. Claude Sonnet 5.5 was faster: 31 min 3 s less in total, and faster on each of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Claude Sonnet 5.5's Breakout game plays; Hy4 Preview's loads but doesn't start.
Rebuild this screen experiment: Claude Sonnet 5.5's rebuild matched the screenshot at 94%; Hy4 Preview was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Claude Sonnet 5.5's game passed 5 of 5 checks; Hy4 Preview was not in it.





