Mercury 3 vs GPT-6.1 Sol
Mercury 3 took 7 min 31 s and $0.065 at list price, GPT-6.1 Sol took 12 min 10 s and $0.37 at list price. GPT-6.1 Sol took 1.6× as long and cost 5.7× as much.
Mercury 3
Inception · $0.35/M out · 258 HN pts
GPT-6.1 Sol
OpenAI · $10.00/M out · 1,166 HN pts
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 studio in Rotterdam, keeping vintage synthesizers in working hands. We repair the instruments that have picked up a crackle, lost a voice, drifted out of tune, or stopped making sound altogether.
We like the patient side of repair: tracing a fault, understanding an old circuit, and finding the right fix rather than the quickest workaround. Our aim is to make each instrument dependable without sanding away the character that made someone fall for it in the first place.
Some synths arrive with a clear problem. Others come with a story and a noise that only happens after twenty minutes. Either way, the work starts with listening—to the instrument and to the person who plays it.
We’re a small studio by choice. It keeps us close to the work, and to the musicians who trust us with something they want to keep making music with.
Specs and numbers
| Mercury 3 | GPT-6.1 Sol | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Inception | OpenAI |
| Made in | US | US |
| Released | 16 Oct 2026 | 29 Sep 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $0.10 | $2.00 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $0.35 | $10.00 |
| Context | 1,000,000 tokens | 1,050,000 tokens |
| Weights | closed | closed |
| Hacker News points | 258 | 1,166 |
| Time for the six prompts | 7 min 31 s | 12 min 10 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.065 | $0.37 |
Mercury 3 was cheaper: $0.30 less at list price, and less on 5 of the 6 prompts. Mercury 3 was faster: 4 min 39 s less in total, and faster on 5 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, Mercury 3's Breakout game stopped painting; GPT-6.1 Sol's plays.
Rebuild this screen experiment: GPT-6.1 Sol's rebuild matched the screenshot at 97%; Mercury 3 was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: GPT-6.1 Sol's game passed 5 of 5 checks; Mercury 3 was not in it.