Gemini 4 Hydrogen vs Claude Opus 5.5
Gemini 4 Hydrogen took 8 min 39 s and $0.60 at list price, Claude Opus 5.5 took 11 min 46 s and $1.57 at list price. Claude Opus 5.5 took 1.4× as long and cost 2.6× as much.
Gemini 4 Hydrogen
Google · $7.50/M out · 168 HN pts
Claude Opus 5.5
Anthropic · $20.00/M out · 2,737 HN pts
Only Claude Opus 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.
In a quiet corner of Rotterdam, surrounded by the scent of warm solder and the hum of calibrated oscillators, Patchbay brings classic electronic instruments back to life. We are a three-person studio united by an obsession with vintage synthesizers and the belief that these machines belong under musicians' hands, not gathering dust in storage.
Every synthesizer that crosses our workbench carries decades of history, along with brittle capacitors, worn contacts, and drifting tuning. Whether we are facing a temperamental analog polysynth from the seventies or an early digital classic, we approach each repair with patience and precision. We do not believe in quick fixes. Instead, we study original schematics, source elusive components, and meticulously restore every circuit, keybed, and fader until the instrument plays as reliably as the day it was built. Patchbay exists to keep these irreplaceable voices singing for the next generation of artists.
Patchbay is three people in a narrow workshop near the Maas in Rotterdam. Every day we open up instruments that were built before most of their current owners were born. Some arrive in flight cases and some come wrapped in old bath towels. Most have a story: a Juno that went quiet halfway through a gig, a Minimoog left in someone's attic for thirty years, or a modular system that a previous technician gave up on.
We started Patchbay because we kept seeing good synthesizers sent off as "unrepairable" when all they needed was patience, a schematic and a steady hand. We swap out dried capacitors, hunt for intermittent faults, recalibrate oscillators until they track properly again, and source or rebuild parts that stopped being made decades ago.
We don't try to make old machines sound new. Our job is to make them sound like themselves again, and to make sure they keep working for the next person who plays them.
Specs and numbers
| Gemini 4 Hydrogen | Claude Opus 5.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Anthropic | |
| Made in | US | US |
| Released | 12 Nov 2026 | 22 Sep 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $1.50 | $4.00 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $7.50 | $20.00 |
| Context | 1,048,576 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Weights | closed | closed |
| Hacker News points | 168 | 2,737 |
| Time for the six prompts | 8 min 39 s | 11 min 46 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.60 | $1.57 |
Gemini 4 Hydrogen was cheaper: $0.96 less at list price, and less on 3 of the 6 prompts. Gemini 4 Hydrogen was faster: 3 min 7 s less in total, and faster on 3 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, both Breakout games play.
Rebuild this screen experiment: Claude Opus 5.5's rebuild matched the screenshot at 89%; Gemini 4 Hydrogen was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Claude Opus 5.5's game passed 5 of 5 checks; Gemini 4 Hydrogen was not in it.





