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Flint vs Mercury 3

6 prompts both ran·Specs and numbers·Change models

Flint took 10 min 5 s and was free at list price, Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price. Flint took 1.3× as long.

Flint

Recursive · free route · 36 HN pts

Mercury 3

Inception · $0.35/M out · 258 HN pts

Pelican

Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

Flint's SVG for the "Pelican riding a bicycle" prompt

Flint

43 sfree5.6k tokensAPI
Mercury 3's SVG for the "Pelican riding a bicycle" prompt

Mercury 3

1 min 30 s$0.01028k tokensAPI

Watch

Draw a mechanical wristwatch that shows the current local time, with a sweeping seconds hand and a date window. Make it look expensive.

Still of Flint's page for the "Wristwatch that shows the current time" prompt

Flint

2 min 11 sfree18k tokensAPI
Still of Mercury 3's page for the "Wristwatch that shows the current time" prompt

Mercury 3

70 s$0.01233k tokensAPI

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.

Still of Flint's page for the "Landing page for a cargo bike workshop" prompt

Flint

2 min 52 sfree22k tokensAPI
Still of Mercury 3's page for the "Landing page for a cargo bike workshop" prompt

Mercury 3

42 s$0.00720k tokensAPI

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.

Still of Flint's page for the "Playable Breakout" prompt

Flint

2 min 19 sfree18k tokensAPI
Still of Mercury 3's page for the "Playable Breakout" prompt

Mercury 3

29 s$0.00719k tokensAPI

Design a logo for Night Heron, an independent bookshop that only opens after dark.

Flint's SVG for the "Bookshop logo" prompt

Flint

1 min 47 sfree13k tokensAPI
Mercury 3's SVG for the "Bookshop logo" prompt

Mercury 3

3 min 38 s$0.02983k tokensAPI

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 began in a small, cluttered workshop in Rotterdam, where solder smoke and old capacitors seem to belong together. We are a three-person studio, which means every synthesizer that comes through our door is handled by one of the same people who started the project. No call center, no hand-off to strangers. We repair vintage synthesizers: the dusty analog beasts, the rare oddities, the ones with missing knobs and mysterious tuning drift. Our work is part electronics, part archaeology, part stubborn love. We listen to the hum before we open the case, and we believe most vintage synths are not dead, just waiting for someone to pay attention. In a city known for moving quickly, we prefer taking our time. Patchbay exists to keep old voices alive, one oscillator, filter, and power supply at a time. If you have a synth that sings, whispers, or hums through the decades, we would be glad to meet it.

Flint

13 sfree1.5k tokensAPI

Patchbay is a three-person repair studio in Rotterdam, tucked between a bike shop and a coffee roastery, where vintage synthesizers come to live another life. We are not a factory and we are not a museum; we are technicians who love the smell of warm solder and the patience that old circuits demand. Between us we have restored everything from early Moog modulars to battered Junos, and we treat each instrument as if it were the first one we ever opened. There is no assembly line here. Every capacitor is tested, every busbar tracked by hand, and every voice board is listened to twice—once on the bench, once through the speakers of the synth that will use it. Patchbay exists because these machines deserve more than a quick fix. They deserve someone who knows their quirks, their failures, and the strange, beautiful sounds that made us fall in love with them in the first place.

Mercury 3

3 s<$0.0011.2k tokensAPI

Specs and numbers

FlintMercury 3
MakerRecursiveInception
Made inUSUS
Released21 Oct 202616 Oct 2026
Price in, per M tokensfree route (list $0/M)$0.10
Price out, per M tokensfree route (list $0/M)$0.35
Context262,144 tokens1,000,000 tokens
Weightsopenclosed
Hacker News points36258
Time for the six prompts10 min 5 s7 min 31 s
List price of the six promptsfree$0.065

Flint was free at list price; Mercury 3 cost $0.065. Mercury 3 was faster: 2 min 34 s less in total, and faster on 4 of the 6 prompts.

In the recording, Flint's Breakout game loads but doesn't start; Mercury 3's stopped painting.

Tea Garden experiment: Flint's game passed 5 of 5 checks; Mercury 3 was not in it.

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