Pareto 26.9 vs Claude Sonnet 5.5
Pareto 26.9 took 10 min 32 s and $0.34 at list price, Claude Sonnet 5.5 took 3 min 49 s and $0.34 at list price. Pareto 26.9 took 2.8× as long, and both cost about the same.
Pareto 26.9
Unbiased · $7.50/M out
Claude Sonnet 5.5
Anthropic · $10.00/M out · 9 HN pts
Only Claude Sonnet 5.5 has CLI runs here (Claude Code).
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 small workshop in the heart of Rotterdam, where three people spend their days elbow-deep in the guts of vintage synthesizers. We fix the machines that made the sounds you grew up with—the ones that shaped entire genres and then got left in basements when the tech moved on. But we're not a museum. Our benches are covered in solder, schematics, and the occasional broken key that's been there for two weeks longer than we'd like to admit.
We started this studio because we got tired of seeing classic gear being stripped for parts, or worse, turned into Instagram decor. These instruments deserve better. They were built to make noise, and we want to keep them doing exactly that.
Between the three of us, we've fixed everything from a 1960s Buchla to a beat-up Juno that fell down a flight of stairs. If you've got a synth that's gone quiet, bring it in. We'll bring it back.
Patchbay is three people in a workshop in Rotterdam, trying to keep old synthesizers alive. We repair, restore and recalibrate the instruments that shaped electronic music: Moogs and Oberheims, Rolands and Sequential Circuits, the odd temperamental Soviet oddity that someone found in an attic.
Most of what lands on our benches has been silent for years. A crackling pot, a drifting oscillator, a power supply that gave up in 1994. Some come from working musicians who need their instrument back before the next tour. Others come from people who inherited a dusty box from a parent and want to hear what it sounds like.
We work slowly and by hand. We trace faults with a scope and a schematic, source or rebuild parts when originals are gone, and change as little as we can. Every synth leaves with a note describing exactly what we did, so the next person to open it knows where we have been.
Come by, bring your synth, and stay for coffee.
Specs and numbers
| Pareto 26.9 | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Unbiased | Anthropic |
| Made in | — | US |
| Released | 13 Oct 2026 | 28 Sep 2026 |
| Price in, per M tokens | $2.50 | $2.00 |
| Price out, per M tokens | $7.50 | $10.00 |
| Context | 262,144 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Weights | closed | closed |
| Hacker News points | — | 9 |
| Time for the six prompts | 10 min 32 s | 3 min 49 s |
| List price of the six prompts | $0.34 | $0.34 |
Both cost about the same at list price: $0.34 and $0.34. Claude Sonnet 5.5 was faster: 6 min 44 s less in total, and faster on 5 of the 6 prompts.
In the recording, both Breakout games play. Pareto 26.9's landing page was cut off at the output limit (12,000 tokens).
Rebuild this screen experiment: Claude Sonnet 5.5's rebuild matched the screenshot at 94%; Pareto 26.9 was not in it. Tea Garden experiment: Claude Sonnet 5.5's game passed 5 of 5 checks; Pareto 26.9 was not in it.





