Simon Willison demonstrates how to use Blender with coding agents on macOS by installing the full Mac application from blender.org and issuing prompts to ChatGPT Codex. He shows a step-by-step example where the agent renders a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle, then adds background flair and improves the image. The resulting image is generated via Blender's Python API.
Simon Willison created a .blend URL Viewer tool that lets users view a Blender model of a Fabergé egg themed after the TV show Pluribus directly in their browser. He generated the egg image using ChatGPT Images 2.5, then fed it to GPT‑6 Astra with a custom Blender skill to produce several .blend files. The viewer, built with JavaScript, is now part of his tools collection for easy access to the resulting 3D model.
Simon Willison introduces GPT‑6 Astra, a new model that offers improved attention to detail, better prompt comprehension, and the ability to generate more sophisticated outputs. The model excels at creating 3D renderings, producing detailed scenes such as gardens, shipyards, animals, cityscapes, and even Dyson spheres. Willison highlights its whimsical creativity, noting examples like a pelican wearing a red neckerchief riding a bicycle.
Release: llm-gemini 0. 33 It's been a while since the last llm-gemini release.
The article celebrates the 1988 film *Who Framed Roger Rabbit* and highlights a specific scene where a pelican rides a bicycle. The pelican is animated while the bicycle is a real, water‑filled prop guided by a cable. The author shares details gathered by Cypress Frankenfeld about this creative trick.
Simon Willison experimented with Claude Opus 5.5 to compose computer game music, specifically aiming for a style reminiscent of the original *Secret of Monkey Island*. He designed a simple text-based format for the music and built an artifact capable of playing it, including example tracks. The results were surprisingly good, prompting questions about whether this compositional ability is a new capability emerging in recent text models.
Simon Willison announces the release of ChatGPT Images 2.5, noting that OpenAI’s image generation models have processed over 3 billion images across ChatGPT Images and the GPT‑Image API. The new version improves instruction‑following across multiple turns, speeds up responses, and better preserves subjects from reference photos. Two new API model IDs—gpt‑image‑2.5‑sunburst and gpt‑image‑2.5‑flare—are available, with Sunburst recommended for precision editing and Flare for fast, high‑quality everyday generation. Willison has updated his openai_image.py CLI tool to accept reference images, demonstrating its use with a raccoon scientist prompt.
Simon Willison describes a game experiment called "Tree Appreciator" created with Claude Opus 5.5 Max. The game, built in three.js, presents two algorithmically generated trees and challenges players to appreciate their differences through a spot‑the‑difference style mechanic. After three hours and seven minutes of processing, Claude produced a polished, music‑and‑animation‑rich game with achievements that feels both fun and beautiful.
Simon Willison presented a closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, where he showcased a pixel‑art animation of kakapo parrots celebrating a record‑breaking breeding season in 2026. He used Claude Opus 5.5 to generate the animation from Google‑searched kakapo photos, then employed Claude Code with Playwright to record a 15‑second video of the animated HTML5 canvas, which he embedded in his Keynote slide.
The release of llm‑anthropic 0.27 updates the Anthropic plugin for LLM to be compatible with the newly released anthropic v1.0.0 Python library, which has switched from httpx to httpx2. This mirrors a similar change made by OpenAI in their v3.0.0 release two weeks prior. The update includes a migration guide and a pull request that ensures tests pass after upgrading to anthropic>=1.
Quick Study is a tool that lets users open a photo and quickly generate a painted version of it using a canvas element and a simulated paintbrush. The process relies on Sobel edge detection and requires no external libraries beyond Google Fonts. It builds on previous experiments that used Claude Fable to create watercolor illustrations with P5.js.
Stop Making TUIs Thomas Ptacek advocates for building real native user interfaces for even the smallest of personal tools, because coding agents have reduced the cost of getting a usable-enough GUI up and running to almost nothing. I wrote about my vibe-coded bandwidth and GPU monitoring macOS task bar apps back in March , and I'm still using both of those on a daily basis.
webframe is a Go‑based tool that runs a web page in a hidden headless browser and streams console output and errors to the terminal. It uses the glaze library to access native browser engines (WKWebView, WebKitGTK, WebView2) without bundling its own engine, making it lightweight compared to tools like Playwright. The author evaluated it as both a sandboxing solution and a web‑scraping utility, comparing it to his own shot‑scraper JavaScript tool.