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[ARTICLE · art-165977] src=simonwillison.net ↗ pub= topic=generative-ai verified=true sentiment=↑ positive

The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford

Simon Willison reported that Claude Opus 5.5 Medium, running in regular Claude Chat, ported a Three.js Nudibranch-themed Fabergé Egg he built into Vanilla JavaScript and WebGL without Three.js, producing a 98KB file versus the original 77KB version. Willison said the two outputs are not identical and that he does not fully understand why they differed, though he found the Three.js code slightly easier to read himself.

read1 min views3 publishedNov 9, 2026

My comment on The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford — Hacker News. OK, this comment convinced me to give that a shot.

Here's a thing I made in Three.js this morning - a Nudibranch themed Faberge Egg: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg... (77KB)

I just asked Claude (Opus 5.5 Medium running in regular Claude Chat) to port that to Vanilla JS, in the same thread where it had built it, and got this: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg... (98KB)

They aren't identical - you can see what Claude said about that in the transcript (I don't fully understand why it differed): https://claude.ai/share/e56d163e-2793-4677-aa11-191d5058b414

But yeah, it turns out Claude Opus 5.5 is perfectly capable of 3D modeling in Vanilla JS + WebGL without Three.js.

In eyeballing the code I find the Three.js slightly easier to understand myself, but I rarely look at the code for these 3D projects so that isn't a particularly big deal.

Tags: hacker-news, javascript, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude, three-js

source & further reading
simonwillison.net — original article Hide your slop PR descriptions behind <details><summary> Parse_number() as a SQLite extension: C vs. Rust datasette-llm 0.1a10
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