Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs MiniMax M3
Claude Sonnet 5.5 took 3 min 49 s and $0.34 at list price, MiniMax M3 took 33 min 3 s and $0.21 at list price. MiniMax M3 took 8.7× as long, and Claude Sonnet 5.5 cost 1.6× as much.
Claude Sonnet 5.5
Anthropic · $10.00/M out · 9 HN pts
MiniMax M3
MiniMax · $1.20/M out · 144 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 began in a cluttered apartment in Rotterdam, where three friends spent weekends coaxing old synthesizers back to life. What started as a shared obsession quickly outgrew the living room. In 2016, we opened our first proper workshop in a converted warehouse on the south side of the city, and we have been soldering, calibrating, and listening closely ever since.
We are a small team of three. Niels handles the analog work, coaxing warm tones from aging oscillators and reluctant filters. Marijn focuses on digital systems and the occasional stubborn MIDI quirk. Sanna manages restorations, sourcing rare components and keeping long projects on track. Between us, we have decades of experience with the machines that shaped electronic music.
Every synth that passes through our doors carries decades of sound inside it. Our job is to make sure that story continues.
Specs and numbers
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | MiniMax M3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Anthropic | MiniMax |
| Made in | US | China |
| Released | 28 Sep 2026 | 31 May 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $2.00 | $0.30 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $10.00 | $1.20 |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Weights | closed | open |
| Hacker News points | 9 | 144 |
| Time for the six prompts | 3 min 49 s | 33 min 3 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.34 | $0.21 |
MiniMax M3 was cheaper: $0.13 less at list price, and less on 4 of the 6 prompts. Claude Sonnet 5.5 was faster: 29 min 14 s less in total, and faster on each 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%; MiniMax M3 was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Claude Sonnet 5.5's game passed 5 of 5 checks; MiniMax M3 was not in it.