A giant golden banana monument on a trading floor surrounded by cheering traders

EST. 2026 · POTASSIUM-DENOMINATED SECURITIES

BANEX

THE BANANA STANDARD

One absurd prompt. Seven frontier models. Each was asked to build a fake high-finance banana ripeness trading terminal — and we audited every token they burned doing it.

0models listed
0lines shipped
0total burn
∞best LOC/$
VIEW THE TAPE ↓
01

The Assignment

A listing notice from the exchange floor.

BananeExchange_Prompt.md

> Build a visually spectacular but completely useless single-page website: the Banana Ripeness Exchange — a fake high-finance trading terminal for bananas.

> Bloomberg-terminal-for-bananas aesthetic. Animated ripeness futures candlesticks. Ticker tape: BANA PEEL SPOT MUSH CHIQ.

> KPI cards for Peel Volatility, Bruise Index, Potassium Yield, and Institutional Monkey Flow. A market panic button. All of it must do absolutely nothing real.

> One self-contained index.html. No deps. No build. No excuses.

█

Every model got the same prompt, the same token-frugality house rules, and one shot* at glory. Then the session logs were audited line by line: every input token, every cache hit, every reasoning burst — priced at official rates and divided by deliverable lines of code.

The result is the only metric that matters in this economy:

LOC per dollarpotassium-adjusted returns on compute

* GPT 5.5 appears three times because it was the prompt-tuning guinea pig: early prompt drafts let it burn tokens spinning up servers and browser-validating its own work. Attempt #3 ran on the final prompt every other model received — that's the one on the tape. All three trade in the gallery.

02

The Tape

Official listings, ranked by potassium-adjusted returns.

Seven bananas in a row showing ripeness progression from green to black, one per model, ordered by cost per run
THE OFFICIAL RIPENESS SCALE — EVERY MODEL ASSIGNED ITS BANANA BY COST PER RUN. GREEN: UNDERPRICED · GOLD: FAIR VALUE · BLACK: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT YOUR BURN RATE

Ripeness verdicts are the opinion of the BANEX Ratings Desk and are final. LOC/$ = deliverable lines ÷ audited session cost at official published rates.

03

Market Data

Three views of the same seven tickers. One of them required a logarithmic axis and a small act of mathematical surrender.

LOC per Dollar LOG SCALE

Lines of deliverable code bought per US dollar. Note the axis: it spans three orders of magnitude, and then gives up entirely.

Cost per Run

What one banana terminal actually cost, in real money.

Lines Shipped

Raw output volume. More lines ≠ better terminal. But it does ≠ fewer lines.

View the raw tape (table)
ModelHarnessLinesLOC / $Cost / run

MARKET ANOMALY REPORT

The Banana Singularity

A 27-billion-parameter Qwen, quantized to Q8, running on hardware that was already paid for, produced 590 lines of banana terminal for an API cost of zero dollars and zero cents. Dividing by zero, the Ratings Desk hereby certifies the first infinite LOC-per-dollar print in exchange history.

DeepSeek V4 Flash, at 90,734.7 LOC/$, filed a formal complaint that it "basically also rounds to infinity." The complaint was priced at $0.00001 and dismissed.

A solid-gold banana trophy on a black marble plinth under a spotlight
THE GOLDEN BANANA · AWARDED FOR INFINITE RETURNS · QWEN 3.6-27B
A chimpanzee in a tailored suit working at a financial trading desk, a single banana beside the monitors
Dr. H. Bonobo, Chief Potassium Strategist — BANEX Ratings Desk
04

Analyst Note

“Institutional monkey flow remains constructive. We are overweight local inference, equal-weight caching discipline, and underweight any model that bills like a boutique law firm.

Sonnet 5 is the value play of the quarter — 1,311 lines per dollar at intro pricing is the kind of print that gets a banana named after you. Fable 5 delivered undeniable craft at 246 LOC/$; we rate it Erewhon Banana: exquisite, and you will feel it.

Guidance unchanged: buy green, hold yellow, sell brown.”

— Morning note, distributed floor-wide at the open