Synthwave
Synthwave — sunset-grid synthwave loop.
What I asked each model — the Synthwave prompt
Every model on this page got this exact prompt inside the Agent Operating System: Synthwave — sunset-grid synthwave loop.
Single HTML file out. No iteration. No examples in the system prompt. Whatever each model produced on the first run is what's on this page. 23 frontier models have attempted it so far: Claude Fable 5, Fugu Ultra, Fugu Mini, Fusion, Gemini 3.6 Flash, GLM-5.2, GPT-5.6 Sol, Grok, Inkling, Kimi K2.7, Kimi K3, MiniMax M3, Hermes MoA, Opus 4.8, Claude Opus 5, Qwen 3.8, Qwen 3.7, Claude Sonnet 5, Kimi K2.7 · Fast, Kimi K2.7 · No-Think, Kimi K2.7 · Quality, DeepSeek V4 Pro, DeepSeek V4 Flash.
Why this task matters. Synthwave is a textbook test of visual-class capability — the kind of build that exposes whether a model is doing pattern-matching or actual reasoning. Shipping this cleanly is the floor for what I expect from a frontier model — every model on the leaderboard should at least attempt it.
How each model handled Synthwave
Ranked by my 0–10 score from the source comparison guides on agentos.guide. Click any to play the actual one-shot HTML the model produced.
What I saw: Nails every synthwave staple — banded gradient sun, glowing perspective grid, layered mountain silhouettes, starfield and neon pylons with strong purple/pink/cyan palette and clean typographic title. The one oddity is the pink pylon clipping oddly close to the camera, but overall it's a polished, on-brief render that competes for the top.
What I saw: Ultra v2 — synthwave terrain flythrough. Smoke-test PASS (4.3% pixel diff).
What I saw: Synthwave terrain flythrough with grid + scanline sun. Smoke-test PASS.
What I saw: Synthwave flythrough on three.js + WebGL. Neon grid below, scanline sun, mountain silhouettes. CRT effect on top.
What I saw: Strong synthwave build with glowing neon grid road, wireframe mountains, retro arch/sun, chip-tune audio synthesis, and polished CRT-scanline HUD; the pink/cyan palette and vaporwave title nail the brief, though the tunnel arch reads slightly muddy and the road wireframe geometry near the camera looks a touch busy versus a cleaner classic sunset-sun composition.
What I saw: This is GLM's. A cyan wireframe mountain range scrolling under a scanline synthwave sun — the single most beautiful frame in the whole shoot-out. Opus's clean Tron grid and magenta horizon is a close, cooler-toned second. Kimi got the idea but blew the exposure — the grid washes out to near-white. GLM wins this one going away.
What I saw: Nails every synthwave cue — striped sunset, layered neon mountains, twinkling stars, glowing perspective grid with a clean vanishing point and steer/pulse interactivity — with polished typography and gradients; only nit is the paused status showing on capture, otherwise a textbook, task-topping render.
What I saw: A scanline sun behind a bold silhouette, a neon grid running to the horizon. Proper retro atmosphere, zero clicks.
What I saw: Strong typography and neon grid perspective land the synthwave vibe, but the sun renders as a flat pale-white disc (not a warm gradient sunset) and the emissive cyan 'lines' read as stray beams shooting through the sun rather than a polished retro loop, keeping it below the field's best.
What I saw: This is GLM's. A cyan wireframe mountain range scrolling under a scanline synthwave sun — the single most beautiful frame in the whole shoot-out. Opus's clean Tron grid and magenta horizon is a close, cooler-toned second. Kimi got the idea but blew the exposure — the grid washes out to near-white. GLM wins this one going away.
The winner on Synthwave
GLM-5.2 took gold on this task. winner · best frame here.
What I saw: This is GLM's. A cyan wireframe mountain range scrolling under a scanline synthwave sun — the single most beautiful frame in the whole shoot-out. Opus's clean Tron grid and magenta horizon is a close, cooler-toned second. Kimi got the idea but blew the exposure — the grid washes out to near-white. GLM wins this one going away.
See GLM-5.2's full model card: /models/glm.
Every attempt — live, playable
Side by side. Click any tile to run that model's actual one-shot HTML in a new tab.
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▶ LIVEHow I scored Synthwave — methodology
Three axes, 0–10 each, averaged. Runs: drop the .html in a browser; if it opens to a broken page, it scores zero. Hits the brief: did the model ship the thing the prompt asked for, or a different thing it found easier. Looks good: visual polish, motion, interactivity — where most of the gap between gold and silver lives.
My scores trace back to the source comparison guides on agentos.guide. See the full methodology page for data provenance, including which source guide each cell's score came from.
Related
More visual benchmarks: all tasks in the Visual category · See the best AI model for Synthwave · Back to the leaderboard
Run this stack yourself.
Every demo on this bench was built inside the Agent Operating System — one prompt, one shot, single HTML file out. The Agent OS, the prompts, the templates, the weekly walkthroughs and 4,000+ founders shipping with it every day all live inside the AI Profit Boardroom.