Mercury 3 vs Inkling
Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price, Inkling took 8 min 30 s and $0.21 at list price. Inkling took 1.1× as long and cost 3.2× as much.
Mercury 3
Inception · $0.35/M out · 258 HN pts
Inkling
Thinking Machines · $4.05/M out · free route · 4 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 is a three-person repair studio in Rotterdam dedicated to vintage synthesizers. We work on analog circuits, replace failing capacitors and resistors, calibrate unstable oscillators, and restore instruments that have been silent for years. Our bench sees early Japanese mono synths, European string machines, American polys, and large modular systems. We treat each repair as a specific problem rather than a routine job, because these machines were built differently and fail differently. The studio grew out of our own need for careful, local repairs. Over time, musicians, collectors, and producers across the Netherlands started bringing us gear they could not trust elsewhere. We open every case with the same approach: diagnose the fault properly, use appropriate parts, and test the result thoroughly. We do not apply quick fixes or ignore underlying issues. Whether your synthesizer suffers from tuning drift, dead voices, noisy outputs, or an unknown electrical fault, we are in Rotterdam to find the cause and return it to reliable working condition.
Specs and numbers
| Mercury 3 | Inkling | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Inception | Thinking Machines |
| Made in | US | US |
| Released | 16 Oct 2026 | 17 Jul 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $0.10 | free route (list $1.00/M) |
| Price out, per M tokens | $0.35 | free route (list $4.05/M) |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 524,288 tokens |
| Weights | closed | open |
| Hacker News points | 258 | 4 |
| Time for the six prompts | 7 min 31 s | 8 min 30 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.065 | $0.21 |
Mercury 3 was cheaper: $0.14 less at list price, and less on 4 of the 6 prompts. Mercury 3 was faster: 59 s less in total, and faster on 4 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Mercury 3's Breakout game stopped painting; Inkling's plays.
Rebuild this screen experiment: Inkling's rebuild matched the screenshot at 51%; Mercury 3 was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Inkling's game passed 5 of 5 checks; Mercury 3 was not in it.





