Flint vs GLM 5.3 Prime
Flint took 10 min 5 s and was free at list price, GLM 5.3 Prime took 55 min 49 s and $3.43 at list price. GLM 5.3 Prime took 5.5× as long.
Flint
Recursive · free route · 36 HN pts
GLM 5.3 Prime
Z.ai · $8.80/M out
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.
Some of the machines we work on were built before any of us were born. Patchbay is a three-person repair studio in Rotterdam, and what we do is simple to describe: we keep vintage synthesizers playing. A Minimoog that sat in an attic for thirty years. A Juno-60 with keys that no longer speak. A modular system that hums where it should roar. Whatever comes through our door gets opened up, traced through, and brought back.
That means rebuilding power supplies, cleaning a thousand key contacts, chasing a fault across three boards until it turns out to be a single cracked solder joint. It means calibrating oscillators that have drifted for decades, and listening — really listening — until a filter sounds the way it did the day it left the factory.
We do this because these instruments still sound like nothing else, and because somewhere a player is waiting to hear one come back to life.
Specs and numbers
| Flint | GLM 5.3 Prime | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Recursive | Z.ai |
| Made in | US | China |
| Released | 21 Oct 2026 | 23 Sep 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | free route (list $0/M) | $2.80 |
| Price out, per M tokens | free route (list $0/M) | $8.80 |
| Context | 262,144 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Weights | open | closed |
| Hacker News points | 36 | — |
| Time for the six prompts | 10 min 5 s | 55 min 49 s |
| List price of the six prompts | free | $3.43 |
Flint was free at list price; GLM 5.3 Prime cost $3.43. Flint was faster: 45 min 45 s less in total, and faster on each of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Flint's Breakout game loads but doesn't start; GLM 5.3 Prime's plays. GLM 5.3 Prime's landing page was cut off at the output limit (131,072 tokens).
Tea Garden experiment: Flint's game passed 5 of 5 checks; GLM 5.3 Prime was not in it.





