Mercury 3 vs GLM 5.3
Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price, GLM 5.3 took 22 min 22 s and $0.34 at list price. GLM 5.3 took 3.0× as long and cost 5.3× 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 where vintage synthesizers come back to life. Whatever lands on our bench — a battered Minimoog, a Juno with dead keys, an ARP silent since the eighties — gets the same treatment: careful diagnosis, honest advice, and repairs done right.
We started Patchbay because we believe a good synthesizer shouldn't die of old age. These machines are more than circuits and sliders — they're the sound of records you grew up with, and the reason some of us got into music in the first place. Every one we fix goes back out into the world ready to make more.
Between us we handle everything from recapping and calibration to keybed work and the hunt for parts nobody has made in decades. It's slow, meticulous work, and we like it that way. If something in your collection hums, crackles, or refuses to turn on, bring it in — we'll see what we can do.
Specs and numbers
| Mercury 3 | GLM 5.3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Inception | Z.ai |
| Made in | US | China |
| Released | 16 Oct 2026 | 18 Aug 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $0.10 | $0.07 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $0.35 | $1.40 |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,048,576 tokens |
| Weights | closed | open |
| Hacker News points | 258 | 3,306 |
| Time for the six prompts | 7 min 31 s | 22 min 22 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.065 | $0.34 |
Mercury 3 was cheaper: $0.27 less at list price, and less on each of the 6 prompts. Mercury 3 was faster: 14 min 51 s less in total, and faster on each of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, both Breakout games stopped painting. GLM 5.3's Breakout game showed a blank first frame when the still was taken.
Tea Garden experiment: GLM 5.3's game passed 1 of 5 checks; Mercury 3 was not in it.





