Flint vs Claude Fable 5.1
Flint took 10 min 5 s and was free at list price, Claude Fable 5.1 took 16 min 4 s and $3.97 at list price. Claude Fable 5.1 took 1.6× as long.
Flint
Recursive · free route · 36 HN pts
Claude Fable 5.1
Anthropic · $50.00/M out · 1,630 HN pts
Only Claude Fable 5.1 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 began in a small, cluttered workshop in Rotterdam, where solder smoke and old capacitors seem to belong together. We are a three-person studio, which means every synthesizer that comes through our door is handled by one of the same people who started the project. No call center, no hand-off to strangers. We repair vintage synthesizers: the dusty analog beasts, the rare oddities, the ones with missing knobs and mysterious tuning drift. Our work is part electronics, part archaeology, part stubborn love. We listen to the hum before we open the case, and we believe most vintage synths are not dead, just waiting for someone to pay attention. In a city known for moving quickly, we prefer taking our time. Patchbay exists to keep old voices alive, one oscillator, filter, and power supply at a time. If you have a synth that sings, whispers, or hums through the decades, we would be glad to meet it.
Patchbay is three people and one workshop in Rotterdam, and we spend our days bringing old synthesizers back to life. Most of what arrives at our bench is somewhere between thirty and fifty years old: a Juno with a dead voice chip, a Minimoog that drifts out of tune the moment the room warms up, a Polysix whose battery has quietly eaten its own circuit board. We know these instruments inside and out because we have had hundreds of them open on the table.
We started Patchbay because we kept meeting musicians who had been told their synth was not worth fixing. We disagree. These machines were built to be serviced, and with the right parts, enough patience, and a good set of schematics, almost any of them can be made to play again. When we hand an instrument back, we want it to sound the way it did the day it left the factory, or better.
Specs and numbers
| Flint | Claude Fable 5.1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Recursive | Anthropic |
| Made in | US | US |
| Released | 21 Oct 2026 | 1 Sep 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | free route (list $0/M) | $10.00 |
| Price out, per M tokens | free route (list $0/M) | $50.00 |
| Context | 262,144 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Weights | open | closed |
| Hacker News points | 36 | 1,630 |
| Time for the six prompts | 10 min 5 s | 16 min 4 s |
| List price of the six prompts | free | $3.97 |
Flint was free at list price; Claude Fable 5.1 cost $3.97. Flint was faster: 6 min less in total, and faster on 4 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Flint's Breakout game loads but doesn't start; Claude Fable 5.1's stopped painting.
Rebuild this screen experiment: Claude Fable 5.1's rebuild matched the screenshot at 78%; Flint was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Flint's game passed 5 of 5 checks, Claude Fable 5.1's 5 of 5.





