Simon Willison

Here is your daily Simon Willison blog digest for September 5, 2026, summarizing his latest hands-on experiments and insights on new developer tooling:

Highlight

Simon’s practical guide on driving Blender with coding agents on macOS is today’s highlight, showcasing how easily developers can programmatically control local desktop applications using conversational prompts. This hands-on exploration beautifully mirrors OpenAI’s official release of GPT-6 Astra, which features Simon’s signature “pelican riding a bicycle” benchmark in its developer demo.

Posts

Using Blender with coding agents on macOS · Source In this TIL post, Simon shares how remarkably simple it is to use local coding agents in ChatGPT Codex to control the Blender application on macOS. By directing the agent to use the installed application path, he iteratively prompted it to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle, adding background details and flair through natural conversational guidance. The process resulted in a Python script that leverages Blender’s native Python API to programmatically construct the 3D scene. This serves as a powerful demonstration of how AI coding assistants can seamlessly bridge the gap between natural language and complex local desktop software APIs.

Introducing GPT-6 Astra for developers · Source Simon points out OpenAI’s release video for GPT-6 Astra, highlighting that his classic test prompt—a pelican riding a bicycle—makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance at the 1m59s mark. He notes that Astra represents a major upgrade in prompt comprehension, attention to detail, and generating sophisticated outputs, particularly in the realm of 3D modeling where it excels at rendering complex environments like gardens, shipyards, animals, and Dyson spheres. Simon links to Hacker News discussions and a previous post highlighting how Astra really does believe in putting a red neckerchief on its rendered pelicans, as discussed in a previous post and Hacker News comment.

Project Pulse

This daily update highlights a focused interest in AI-assisted 3D generation, showing how local coding agents using Blender’s Python API can achieve impressive rendering results in parallel with the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, which sets a high bar for native 3D model creation.

💡 What should we explore next? I can help you break down the Python code Simon used to control Blender, or we can look further into GPT-6 Astra’s new capabilities!