Mercury 3 vs Gemini 4 Argon
Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price, Gemini 4 Argon took 13 min 43 s and $0.68 at list price. Gemini 4 Argon took 1.8× as long and cost 10× as much.
Mercury 3
Inception · $0.35/M out · 258 HN pts
Gemini 4 Argon
Google · $10.00/M out · 2,036 HN pts
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 a three-person repair studio in Rotterdam, tucked between a bike shop and a coffee roastery, where vintage synthesizers come to live another life. We are not a factory and we are not a museum; we are technicians who love the smell of warm solder and the patience that old circuits demand. Between us we have restored everything from early Moog modulars to battered Junos, and we treat each instrument as if it were the first one we ever opened. There is no assembly line here. Every capacitor is tested, every busbar tracked by hand, and every voice board is listened to twice—once on the bench, once through the speakers of the synth that will use it. Patchbay exists because these machines deserve more than a quick fix. They deserve someone who knows their quirks, their failures, and the strange, beautiful sounds that made us fall in love with them in the first place.
In a quiet industrial building overlooking the Maas, the air smells of warm dust, solder flux, and ozone. This is Patchbay, a three-person workshop in Rotterdam dedicated to keeping the golden age of electronic music alive. We don’t view vintage synthesizers as museum pieces to be locked behind glass. To us, a Roland Jupiter-8 or an ARP Odyssey is a living, breathing instrument meant to be played, gigged, and pushed to its sonic limits.
Between the three of us, we have spent decades deciphering faded schematics, hunting down obsolete transistors, and cleaning decades of club grime from beneath weighted keys. Rotterdam is a city built on raw electronics and relentless rhythms, and we take pride in keeping its hardware running. Whether you bring us a touring workhorse with a dead voice chip or a garage-find modular rig that hasn’t powered on since 1984, we are here to make it sing again.
Specs and numbers
| Mercury 3 | Gemini 4 Argon | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Inception | |
| Made in | US | US |
| Released | 16 Oct 2026 | 13 Oct 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $0.10 | $2.00 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $0.35 | $10.00 |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Weights | closed | closed |
| Hacker News points | 258 | 2,036 |
| Time for the six prompts | 7 min 31 s | 13 min 43 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.065 | $0.68 |
Mercury 3 was cheaper: $0.61 less at list price, and less on each of the 6 prompts. Mercury 3 was faster: 6 min 12 s less in total, and faster on 5 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Mercury 3's Breakout game stopped painting; Gemini 4 Argon's plays.
Rebuild this screen experiment: Gemini 4 Argon's rebuild matched the screenshot at 69%; Mercury 3 was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Gemini 4 Argon's game passed 5 of 5 checks; Mercury 3 was not in it.





