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.
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 tested GPT‑6 Astra by generating SVG pelicans riding bicycles at various reasoning levels and compared the results to GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. The Astra pelicans consistently outperformed the other models, especially at low and xhigh reasoning levels, and even the Astra max version produced high‑quality images. Astra also used fewer tokens and was roughly twice as expensive as Sol, yet its low‑level output was cheaper and superior to any Sol model.
Release: llm-gemini 0. 33 It's been a while since the last llm-gemini release.
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.
I started building my markdown-svg-renderer tool in May , but I've since added enough features to it that it's worth talking about here again. It's evolved into my ideal tool for sharing Markdown transcripts that include SVG documents.