The Rematch Kit — the $2-model-vs-$30-ones decision card, the full blind-test protocol, all 5 prompts verbatim, and the cost receipts from testing Grok 4.6 on day one
The companion to Blind Taste Test #2. On 2026-08-13 — one day after Grok 4.6 shipped — we ran the same five one-shot prompts through Grok 4.6, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Claude Fable 5, names stripped, machine-verified wherever a machine could judge. The result: a dead tie on every machine-verifiable round — so the real verdict lives in the receipts. INSIDE: (1) THE SCOREBOARD — five rounds, three models, every machine verdict, plus the four numbers that actually differed: Grok's $0.09 R2 bill vs Sol's ~$0.26 for the same 8/8 pass, Sol's 4.4-second answer on a 137K-token haystack, Fable's 16.0KB app vs 19.5/26.5KB passing the same checks, and Grok's $1.72 total for all six calls. (2) THE DECISION CARD — bulk reading and agents go to Grok 4.6 ($2/$6 per 1M, doubling past 200K prompt tokens — it read 314,053 tokens in one call, went 4/4, and billed $1.27); latency goes to GPT-5.6 Sol; code you'll maintain and prose you'll publish go to Claude Fable 5 — plus the meta-rule: correctness is table stakes now, you're paying for a trait. (3) ALL FIVE PROMPTS VERBATIM — the bug hunt, the pomodoro UI build, the messy-CSV janitor, the needle questions, and the subtext scene, exactly as sent, so you can re-run the whole test. (4) THE VERIFICATION PROTOCOL — fuzz-vs-oracle with 500 random sequences, 8 headless Playwright checks, script-computed ground-truth diffs, and the needle-and-traps haystack design (draft-vs-final decoys, 7 real incidents plus 3 that must not be counted). (5) THE COST RECEIPTS — the full per-round cost/latency/token table and the like-for-like bill: $0.45 vs ~$1.19 for the same five rounds. (6) RUN IT YOURSELF — the 6-step protocol for blind-testing ANY new model on day one, plus the honesty rules (the OpenRouter content-filter refusal, why routes and rigs must be disclosed). Independent kit from Hyperautomation Labs — not affiliated with xAI, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
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