Mercury 3 vs Pareto 26.9
Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price, Pareto 26.9 took 10 min 32 s and $0.34 at list price. Pareto 26.9 took 1.4× as long and cost 5.3× as much.
Mercury 3
Inception · $0.35/M out · 258 HN pts
Pareto 26.9
Unbiased · $7.50/M out
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 workshop in the heart of Rotterdam, where three people spend their days elbow-deep in the guts of vintage synthesizers. We fix the machines that made the sounds you grew up with—the ones that shaped entire genres and then got left in basements when the tech moved on. But we're not a museum. Our benches are covered in solder, schematics, and the occasional broken key that's been there for two weeks longer than we'd like to admit.
We started this studio because we got tired of seeing classic gear being stripped for parts, or worse, turned into Instagram decor. These instruments deserve better. They were built to make noise, and we want to keep them doing exactly that.
Between the three of us, we've fixed everything from a 1960s Buchla to a beat-up Juno that fell down a flight of stairs. If you've got a synth that's gone quiet, bring it in. We'll bring it back.
Specs and numbers
| Mercury 3 | Pareto 26.9 | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Inception | Unbiased |
| Made in | US | — |
| Released | 16 Oct 2026 | 13 Oct 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $0.10 | $2.50 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $0.35 | $7.50 |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 262,144 tokens |
| Weights | closed | closed |
| Hacker News points | 258 | — |
| Time for the six prompts | 7 min 31 s | 10 min 32 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.065 | $0.34 |
Mercury 3 was cheaper: $0.27 less at list price, and less on 5 of the 6 prompts. Mercury 3 was faster: 3 min 2 s less in total, and faster on 4 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Mercury 3's Breakout game stopped painting; Pareto 26.9's plays. Pareto 26.9's landing page was cut off at the output limit (12,000 tokens).