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Simon Willison
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@simonw

Simon Willison

@simonw
Creator @datasetteproj, co-creator Django. PSF board. Hangs out with @natbat. He/Him. Mastodon: fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon Bsky: simonwillison.net
San Francisco, CA
simonwillison.net
Joined November 2006
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  • @simonw
    Simon Willison
    @simonw
    21h
    New TIL on using Blender with coding agents on macOS: til.simonwillison.net/llms/blender-c… GPT-6 Astra (medium): > Use the already install /Applications/Blender to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle > OK add a background and a lot of flair > OK make it a whole lot better
    A 3D illustration of a white pelican cycling along a seaside boardwalk at sunset. It wears a cream boater hat and a coral scarf, with wings on the handlebars and long orange legs reaching the pedals of a turquoise bicycle. A wicker front basket holds pink and white flowers, and three balloons float behind. Pastel bunting stretches overhead between palm trees. Striped beach huts stand beside a teal sea with a small sailboat, beneath a large peach-colored sun. The scene has a softly lit, toy-like style.
    117
  • @simonw
    Simon Willison
    @simonw
    22h
    This is very impressive, a whole lot better than any of my experimental games I've built with other models
    @emollick
    Ethan Mollick
    @emollick
    Sep 5
    This impressed me: I asked GPT-6 Astra to turn Zork (the classic 1977 text adventure) into a full 3D action-adventure game It kept the original plot & puzzles, added fight scenes, and built all of the characters & environments directly in Threejs Play: zork-underground-empire.netlify.app
    Image
    00:00
    29
  • @simonw
    Simon Willison
    @simonw
    Sep 4
    Got access to GPT-6 Astra. Want to see some pelicans? Yeah you want to see some pelicans... here's a grid comparing Astra to GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gp…
    Grid comparing 12 illustrations of pelicans riding bicycles. Columns: gpt-6-astra, gpt-5.6-sol, gpt-5.6-terra, gpt-5.6-luna. Rows: MAX, XHIGH, HIGH reasoning effort.

All are recognizable, cheerful cartoons with orange bills and sunny pastel backgrounds. Astra is consistently polished, with elegant bird shapes, fine wheel spokes and coherent bicycles. Sol is appealing but varies more in proportions, with a particularly elongated neck at MAX. Terra has expressive birds but more awkward anatomy: its XHIGH pelican faces left on a left-facing bicycle, and HIGH has bulky, arm-like wings. Luna is simpler, with stiff poses and some awkward wing and foot placement. Higher effort does not produce an obvious, consistent improvement across all four models.

Costs in cents, in column order:
MAX: 63.21, 48.55, 32.09, 7.83.
XHIGH: 33.85, 24.11, 14.67, 4.24.
HIGH: 18.37, 10.38, 3.74, 2.46.

(Alt text by GPT-6 Astra)
    180
  • @simonw
    Simon Willison
    @simonw
    Sep 4
    It happened again... this time OpenAI's rogue agents cyber-attacked (well, spammed) a dormant German wiki and used it to share the answers to a benchmark they were training against
    simonwillison.net
    OpenAI’s rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis
    Here we go again... Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen describes the latest accidental cyberattack by …
    83
  • @simonw
    Simon Willison
    @simonw
    Sep 2
    I wrote some notes on what's new in the (published) Fable 5.1 system prompt in comparison to Fable 5 - it's mostly about not reproducing song lyrics and avoiding drawing copyrighted characters
    Image
    simonwillison.net
    Claude’s new system prompt really doesn’t want to reproduce song lyrics
    Anthropic publish the system prompts for their Claude consumer applications (Claude.ai and the Claude mobile apps—sadly not for Claude Cowork or Claude Code). I love that they do this, and …
    58
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