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.

My comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50416456 50421091 on The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50416456 — 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... https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg-threejs.html 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... https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg-Vanilla-WebGL.html 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 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 https://simonwillison.net/tags/hacker-news , javascript https://simonwillison.net/tags/javascript , ai https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai , generative-ai https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai , llms https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms , claude https://simonwillison.net/tags/claude , three-js https://simonwillison.net/tags/three-js