A sentence that I would not have expected to read on HN as recently as last year, but that makes perfect sense today.
Jokes asides, @simonw any plan to include a 3D model version (make a 3D model of a Pelican riding a bicycle in Blender)?
Given that Astra seems to have improved a lot in 3D modeling capabilities (and that matches my experience) I'm actually quite interested to see if/when other models catch up and how they stack against it.
Or if anyone knows what would be a useful existing benchmark for that skill.
I got a 3D pelican out of Blender and Astra a few weeks ago: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/5/blender-coding-agents-macos/" rel="nofollow">https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/5/blender-coding-agents-m...
I've not committed to that as a benchmark yet because you really need a full coding agent configured to run Blender, and I like benchmarks I can run as a single prompt/response through the appropriate API.
I have been intending to get more of a coding agent benchmark going though, so maybe this should be part of it.
Well, how about this one... Opus 5.5 wrote a raytracer, IK animation, and pelican riding a bicycle for a novel VM with new instruction set and micro-GPU instruction set (DB32), in 4kb! <a href="https://demobench.janekm.com/studio?demo=pelican" rel="nofollow">https://demobench.janekm.com/studio?demo=pelican
Looking terrible isn't nessesarily a bad thing. The pelican is heavily pre trained now. Having a crappy pelican means you didn't try to juke the stats.
Apologies for not taking the time to find it, but there was a post that tried to determine if the pelican was benchmaxxed across a bunch of models by comparing it to other SVGs, and found that it wasn't at all.
This "no, Virginia, they aren't pelicanmaxxing" article is what broodbucket is probably thinking of: <a href="https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html" rel="nofollow">https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html
In any case, pelicanmaxxing comments without any further proof or evidence probably fall under the "Please don't post shallow dismissals" guideline.
Absurd to think pelicans translate to coding performance. I don't care about coding! I need to generate a large volume of high quality pelican SVGs
Making SVGs is coding (of a very specific markup language). So it's not actually absurd. We've also seen that more capable models are generally better at everything minus benchmark contamination (benchmaxxing) anomalities.
can you update this website, I just wish the entire layout wouldn't shift when the page gets loaded and the timestamps in the title look very ugly and take up a lot of space.
Not sure if it is the same thing they're referring, but the transition from loading the prompt from the gist to the result is indeed jarring: <a href="https://files.catbox.moe/c56eyl.mp4" rel="nofollow">https://files.catbox.moe/c56eyl.mp4
I don't believe it is that important, but I guess you might've just hit some people's pet peeve with that. If anything, it goes to show as to why skeletons are popular on modern sites
A different pelican on a different bicycle direction(R2L) finally. Wondering why MiMo V2.6 Pro choose R2L and Flash choose L2R for the bicycle direction.
pro model was having fun on minimal effort with that fish lmao, hilarious.
out of curiosity, is it the first time we're seeing a fish there? I don't remember seeing that detail before.
simonw · · focus · HN ↗
Pelicans for Pro: <a href="https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2F53688c39d37bcbf0cb1a98781c277cdb" rel="nofollow">https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
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Jokes asides, @simonw any plan to include a 3D model version (make a 3D model of a Pelican riding a bicycle in Blender)?
Given that Astra seems to have improved a lot in 3D modeling capabilities (and that matches my experience) I'm actually quite interested to see if/when other models catch up and how they stack against it.
Or if anyone knows what would be a useful existing benchmark for that skill.
simonw · · focus · HN ↗
I've not committed to that as a benchmark yet because you really need a full coding agent configured to run Blender, and I like benchmarks I can run as a single prompt/response through the appropriate API.
I have been intending to get more of a coding agent benchmark going though, so maybe this should be part of it.
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Qwen3.8-27b pelican was amazing on Mac.
<a href="https://www.nudgehost.com/dpjn3uwe" rel="nofollow">https://www.nudgehost.com/dpjn3uwe
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In any case, pelicanmaxxing comments without any further proof or evidence probably fall under the "Please don't post shallow dismissals" guideline.
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<a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/18/the-creative-spirit-of-who-framed-roger-rabbit/" rel="nofollow">https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/18/the-creative-spirit-of...
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I don't believe it is that important, but I guess you might've just hit some people's pet peeve with that. If anything, it goes to show as to why skeletons are popular on modern sites
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