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
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...
phainopepla2 · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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Kurtz79 · · focus · HN ↗
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.
janekm · · focus · HN ↗