Recursive Flint on a 12 GB card vs Gemini 4 Argon vs Opus 5.5
Flint is a free, open-weight coding model (39.8B parameters, about 2.5B active) that Recursive says was built with its automated research system. We ran it on our own RTX 3060 and gave it, Gemini 4 Argon and Claude Opus 5.5 the same four prompts, of the kinds the Gemini 4 "Carbon" leaks showed off. One run each. Cards that needed a fix say so. Everything runs in your browser.
Voxel pagoda
A Minecraft-style pagoda on a lake island: weather, day/night, lanterns, fly-around.
As written it did not start: TypeScript types in a JavaScript file and the 3D canvas never added to the page. Two marked fixes; original kept. Original: pagoda-flint-original/
Cherry trees, red bridge, reflections; rain, snow and fog; lanterns glow at night.
Mountains, a long red bridge, a boat, mirror-like water; rain, snow, night lanterns.
Game controller in SVG
An original controller drawn in SVG: buttons that press with sound, sticks, colour picker, exploded view.
Buttons 1-4, shell colour and exploded view work; the script stops on a missing element, so D-pad, sticks and triggers do nothing.
Textured shell, labelled exploded view with callouts, colour swatches, light-bar presets.
Buttons press, sticks drag, colour picker and exploded view all work.
Exploding orange
A Three.js orange you can slice and explode into labelled layers.
Slice works, but the inside is almost empty; explode moves the halves apart.
Glossy dimpled peel, slice with segments, explode with labels on every layer.
Slice and explode with labelled peel, pith, segments, vesicles and seeds.
Ice-cold soda bottle in SVG
An original "Fizzlo" bottle: bubbles, condensation, a cap that pops with a fizz.
A simple flat label and bubbles; the cap pops.
Glass highlights, rising bubbles, droplets, a designed label; the cap pops with a fizz.
Bubbles and droplets work, but the frosty mist renders as a visible rectangle.
Bonus: the live Snake
The game Flint wrote on camera while we measured its speed.
Time and cost per build
Flint: unsloth flint-UD-IQ3_XXS.gguf (14.5 GB) in llama.cpp b11815 on an RTX 3060 12 GB + 64 GB RAM, 48k context, temperature 1.0,
top-p 0.95, top-k 20 (the model card's settings). Argon and Opus: OpenRouter, reasoning effort low.
| Model | Build | Time | Output tokens | Cost | Fixes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recursive Flint · local RTX 3060 | Voxel pagoda | 8.5 min | 20,241 | $0 (local) | 2 (marked) |
| Gemini 4 Argon | Voxel pagoda | 3.1 min | 15,524 | $0.16 | - |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | Voxel pagoda | 1.1 min | 8,395 | $0.17 | - |
| Recursive Flint · local RTX 3060 | Game controller in SVG | 15.4 min | 35,473 | $0 (local) | - |
| Gemini 4 Argon | Game controller in SVG | 5.1 min | 25,901 | $0.26 | - |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | Game controller in SVG | 39 s | 4,853 | $0.10 | - |
| Recursive Flint · local RTX 3060 | Exploding orange | 7.5 min | 19,657 | $0 (local) | - |
| Gemini 4 Argon | Exploding orange | 3.7 min | 18,429 | $0.18 | - |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | Exploding orange | 50 s | 6,369 | $0.13 | - |
| Recursive Flint · local RTX 3060 | Ice-cold soda bottle in SVG | 13.5 min | 34,432 | $0 (local) | - |
| Gemini 4 Argon | Ice-cold soda bottle in SVG | 4.7 min | 23,679 | $0.24 | - |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | Ice-cold soda bottle in SVG | 1.0 min | 7,479 | $0.15 | - |
The exact prompts are for Ruocco Academy members. The Academy is not open yet: join the waiting list and you get one email when it opens. The demos on this page are free to use for everyone.
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