Ember-1 vs GLM 5.3 Prime
Ember-1 took 25 min 56 s and $1.78 at list price, GLM 5.3 Prime took 55 min 49 s and $3.43 at list price. GLM 5.3 Prime took 2.2× as long and cost 1.9× as much.
Ember-1
Fireworks · $15.00/M out · 589 HN pts
GLM 5.3 Prime
Z.ai · $8.80/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 workshop in Rotterdam dedicated to keeping vintage synthesizers alive. We work on the machines that shaped electronic music — analog polysynths, temperamental drum machines, early digital oddities — replacing tired capacitors, rebuilding keybeds, and coaxing silent oscillators back into tune.
Between us we bring decades of experience in electronics, instrument design, and music-making, but what unites us is simpler: we believe these machines were built to be played, not displayed. Every repair happens by hand at our benches, with period-correct components wherever possible and thoughtful modern solutions where reliability demands it. We test everything the only way that matters — by listening.
Whether your Juno has lost a voice, your 808 has lost its kick, or a flea-market find needs a full restoration, we treat each instrument as if it were heading back to a studio, a stage, and a long life of making noise. Because it is.
Some of the machines we work on were built before any of us were born. Patchbay is a three-person repair studio in Rotterdam, and what we do is simple to describe: we keep vintage synthesizers playing. A Minimoog that sat in an attic for thirty years. A Juno-60 with keys that no longer speak. A modular system that hums where it should roar. Whatever comes through our door gets opened up, traced through, and brought back.
That means rebuilding power supplies, cleaning a thousand key contacts, chasing a fault across three boards until it turns out to be a single cracked solder joint. It means calibrating oscillators that have drifted for decades, and listening — really listening — until a filter sounds the way it did the day it left the factory.
We do this because these instruments still sound like nothing else, and because somewhere a player is waiting to hear one come back to life.
Specs and numbers
| Ember-1 | GLM 5.3 Prime | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Fireworks | Z.ai |
| Made in | US | China |
| Released | 24 Sep 2026 | 23 Sep 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $3.00 | $2.80 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $15.00 | $8.80 |
| Context | 1,048,576 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Weights | closed | closed |
| Hacker News points | 589 | — |
| Time for the six prompts | 25 min 56 s | 55 min 49 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $1.78 | $3.43 |
Ember-1 was cheaper: $1.65 less at list price, and less on each of the 6 prompts. Ember-1 was faster: 29 min 53 s less in total, and faster on each of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, both Breakout games play. GLM 5.3 Prime's landing page was cut off at the output limit (131,072 tokens).
Rebuild this screen experiment: Ember-1's rebuild matched the screenshot at 67%; GLM 5.3 Prime was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Ember-1's game passed 5 of 5 checks; GLM 5.3 Prime was not in it.