Flint vs Claude Sonnet 5.5
Flint took 10 min 5 s and was free at list price, Claude Sonnet 5.5 took 3 min 49 s and $0.34 at list price. Flint took 2.6× as long.
Flint
Recursive · free route · 36 HN pts
Claude Sonnet 5.5
Anthropic · $10.00/M out · 9 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 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 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.
Specs and numbers
| Flint | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Recursive | Anthropic |
| Made in | US | US |
| Released | 21 Oct 2026 | 28 Sep 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | free route (list $0/M) | $2.00 |
| Price out, per M tokens | free route (list $0/M) | $10.00 |
| Context | 262,144 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Weights | open | closed |
| Hacker News points | 36 | 9 |
| Time for the six prompts | 10 min 5 s | 3 min 49 s |
| List price of the six prompts | free | $0.34 |
Flint was free at list price; Claude Sonnet 5.5 cost $0.34. Claude Sonnet 5.5 was faster: 6 min 16 s less in total, and faster on each of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Flint's Breakout game loads but doesn't start; Claude Sonnet 5.5's plays.
Rebuild this screen experiment: Claude Sonnet 5.5's rebuild matched the screenshot at 94%; Flint was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Flint's game passed 5 of 5 checks, Claude Sonnet 5.5's 5 of 5.





