Mercury 3 vs GLM 5.3 Flash
Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price, GLM 5.3 Flash took 59 min 10 s and $0.037 at list price. GLM 5.3 Flash took 7.9× as long, and Mercury 3 cost 1.7× as much.
Mercury 3
Inception · $0.35/M out · 258 HN pts
GLM 5.3 Flash
Z.ai · $0.148/M out · 1,329 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.
Patchbay began the way most repair shops do: with a broken synth, a stubborn owner, and a soldering iron that refused to stay idle. We're three people—Joris, Marit, and Tomas—working out of a small workshop on the back streets of Rotterdam-Noord, surrounded by oscilloscopes, spare parts, and instruments that sometimes arrive in worse condition than their owners admit.
Between us, we've spent decades repairing and restoring vintage synthesizers: Rolands, Moogs, Korgs, Yamahas, and machines whose manuals were never written in the first place. We don't sell anything. We fix things. That focus keeps us honest and keeps the work slow, careful, and done properly.
We believe old instruments deserve to keep making music, not gather dust in attics or fetch prices only collectors can pay. Whether it's a cracked keybed, a dying power supply, or a voice that's gone quiet, we'd like to help bring it back.
Specs and numbers
| Mercury 3 | GLM 5.3 Flash | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Inception | Z.ai |
| Made in | US | China |
| Released | 16 Oct 2026 | 26 Aug 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $0.10 | $0.016 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $0.35 | $0.148 |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Weights | closed | open |
| Hacker News points | 258 | 1,329 |
| Time for the six prompts | 7 min 31 s | 59 min 10 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.065 | $0.037 |
GLM 5.3 Flash was cheaper: $0.027 less at list price, and less on 4 of the 6 prompts. Mercury 3 was faster: 51 min 39 s less in total, and faster on 5 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Mercury 3's Breakout game stopped painting; GLM 5.3 Flash's plays.





