Pareto 26.9 vs Inkling
Pareto 26.9 took 10 min 32 s and $0.34 at list price, Inkling took 8 min 30 s and $0.21 at list price. Pareto 26.9 took 1.2× as long and cost 1.6× as much.
Pareto 26.9
Unbiased · $7.50/M out
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 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 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
| Pareto 26.9 | Inkling | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Unbiased | Thinking Machines |
| Made in | — | US |
| Released | 13 Oct 2026 | 17 Jul 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $2.50 | free route (list $1.00/M) |
| Price out, per M tokens | $7.50 | free route (list $4.05/M) |
| Context | 262,144 tokens | 524,288 tokens |
| Weights | closed | open |
| Hacker News points | — | 4 |
| Time for the six prompts | 10 min 32 s | 8 min 30 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.34 | $0.21 |
Inkling was cheaper: $0.13 less at list price, and less on 3 of the 6 prompts. Inkling was faster: 2 min 2 s less in total, and faster on 3 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, both Breakout games play. Pareto 26.9's landing page was cut off at the output limit (12,000 tokens).
Rebuild this screen experiment: Inkling's rebuild matched the screenshot at 51%; Pareto 26.9 was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Inkling's game passed 5 of 5 checks; Pareto 26.9 was not in it.