Mercury 3 vs Ember-1
Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price, Ember-1 took 25 min 56 s and $1.78 at list price. Ember-1 took 3.5× as long and cost 28× as much.
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 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.
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.
Specs and numbers
| Mercury 3 | Ember-1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Inception | Fireworks |
| Made in | US | US |
| Released | 16 Oct 2026 | 24 Sep 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $0.10 | $3.00 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $0.35 | $15.00 |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Weights | closed | closed |
| Hacker News points | 258 | 589 |
| Time for the six prompts | 7 min 31 s | 25 min 56 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.065 | $1.78 |
Mercury 3 was cheaper: $1.72 less at list price, and less on each of the 6 prompts. Mercury 3 was faster: 18 min 25 s less in total, and faster on 5 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Mercury 3's Breakout game stopped painting; Ember-1's plays.
Rebuild this screen experiment: Ember-1's rebuild matched the screenshot at 67%; Mercury 3 was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Ember-1's game passed 5 of 5 checks; Mercury 3 was not in it.