Pareto 26.9 vs Claude Fable 5.1
Pareto 26.9 took 10 min 32 s and $0.34 at list price, Claude Fable 5.1 took 16 min 4 s and $3.97 at list price. Claude Fable 5.1 took 1.5× as long and cost 12× as much.
Pareto 26.9
Unbiased · $7.50/M out
Claude Fable 5.1
Anthropic · $50.00/M out · 1,630 HN pts
Only Claude Fable 5.1 has CLI runs here (Claude Code).
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 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.
Patchbay is three people and one workshop in Rotterdam, and we spend our days bringing old synthesizers back to life. Most of what arrives at our bench is somewhere between thirty and fifty years old: a Juno with a dead voice chip, a Minimoog that drifts out of tune the moment the room warms up, a Polysix whose battery has quietly eaten its own circuit board. We know these instruments inside and out because we have had hundreds of them open on the table.
We started Patchbay because we kept meeting musicians who had been told their synth was not worth fixing. We disagree. These machines were built to be serviced, and with the right parts, enough patience, and a good set of schematics, almost any of them can be made to play again. When we hand an instrument back, we want it to sound the way it did the day it left the factory, or better.
Specs and numbers
| Pareto 26.9 | Claude Fable 5.1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Unbiased | Anthropic |
| Made in | — | US |
| Released | 13 Oct 2026 | 1 Sep 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $2.50 | $10.00 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $7.50 | $50.00 |
| Context | 262,144 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Weights | closed | closed |
| Hacker News points | — | 1,630 |
| Time for the six prompts | 10 min 32 s | 16 min 4 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.34 | $3.97 |
Pareto 26.9 was cheaper: $3.63 less at list price, and less on 5 of the 6 prompts. Pareto 26.9 was faster: 5 min 32 s less in total, and faster on 5 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Pareto 26.9's Breakout game plays; Claude Fable 5.1's stopped painting. Pareto 26.9's landing page was cut off at the output limit (12,000 tokens).
Rebuild this screen experiment: Claude Fable 5.1's rebuild matched the screenshot at 78%; Pareto 26.9 was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Claude Fable 5.1's game passed 5 of 5 checks; Pareto 26.9 was not in it.





