Mercury 3 vs Muse Spark Open
Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price, Muse Spark Open took 9 min 38 s and $0.29 at list price. Muse Spark Open took 1.3× as long and cost 4.4× as much.
Mercury 3
Inception · $0.35/M out · 258 HN pts
Muse Spark Open
Meta · $4.25/M out · 1,383 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 small studio in Rotterdam where vintage synthesizers come back to life. We are three technicians, musicians and longtime collectors who have spent the last decade trading schematics, hunting spare parts, and learning the quirks of every oscillator and filter that has passed through our hands.
What started as helping friends keep their Junos and ARPs in tune has grown into a dedicated workshop in the north of the city. We repair, restore and service instruments from the sixties to the early nineties, from well-known classics to rare prototypes that barely left the factory.
We believe these machines are more than equipment. They carry histories, imperfections and sounds that cannot be replaced. Our job is to respect that character while making sure each instrument is reliable, playable, and ready for another lifetime of music.
Specs and numbers
| Mercury 3 | Muse Spark Open | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Inception | Meta |
| Made in | US | US |
| Released | 16 Oct 2026 | 15 Oct 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $0.10 | $1.25 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $0.35 | $4.25 |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Weights | closed | open |
| Hacker News points | 258 | 1,383 |
| Time for the six prompts | 7 min 31 s | 9 min 38 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.065 | $0.29 |
Mercury 3 was cheaper: $0.22 less at list price, and less on each of the 6 prompts. Mercury 3 was faster: 2 min 7 s less in total, and faster on 3 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Mercury 3's Breakout game stopped painting; Muse Spark Open's plays.
Rebuild this screen experiment: Muse Spark Open's rebuild matched the screenshot at 53%; Mercury 3 was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Muse Spark Open's game passed 5 of 5 checks; Mercury 3 was not in it.





