Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Inkling
Claude Sonnet 5.5 took 3 min 49 s and $0.34 at list price, Inkling took 8 min 30 s and $0.21 at list price. Inkling took 2.2× as long, and Claude Sonnet 5.5 cost 1.6× as much.
Claude Sonnet 5.5
Anthropic · $10.00/M out · 9 HN pts
Inkling
Thinking Machines · $4.05/M out · free route · 4 HN pts
Only Claude Sonnet 5.5 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 three people in a workshop in Rotterdam, trying to keep old synthesizers alive. We repair, restore and recalibrate the instruments that shaped electronic music: Moogs and Oberheims, Rolands and Sequential Circuits, the odd temperamental Soviet oddity that someone found in an attic.
Most of what lands on our benches has been silent for years. A crackling pot, a drifting oscillator, a power supply that gave up in 1994. Some come from working musicians who need their instrument back before the next tour. Others come from people who inherited a dusty box from a parent and want to hear what it sounds like.
We work slowly and by hand. We trace faults with a scope and a schematic, source or rebuild parts when originals are gone, and change as little as we can. Every synth leaves with a note describing exactly what we did, so the next person to open it knows where we have been.
Come by, bring your synth, and stay for coffee.
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
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Inkling | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Anthropic | Thinking Machines |
| Made in | US | US |
| Released | 28 Sep 2026 | 17 Jul 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $2.00 | free route (list $1.00/M) |
| Price out, per M tokens | $10.00 | free route (list $4.05/M) |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 524,288 tokens |
| Weights | closed | open |
| Hacker News points | 9 | 4 |
| Time for the six prompts | 3 min 49 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 4 of the 6 prompts. Claude Sonnet 5.5 was faster: 4 min 42 s less in total, and faster on 5 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, both Breakout games play.
Rebuild this screen experiment: Claude Sonnet 5.5's rebuild matched the screenshot at 94%, Inkling's 51%. Tea Garden experiment: Claude Sonnet 5.5's game passed 5 of 5 checks, Inkling's 5 of 5.





