On the other hand: the test is clearly not saturated, given that you can see a clear difference in output at the various reasoning levels / model versions.
https://themagnet.substack.com/p/why-is-it-so-hard-to-draw-a...
But either way, with no real way to visualize the result of the text it starts with - it will always be stabbing in the dark. It can't understand conceptually what any of it should look like and then refine the SVG to improve it gradually. It just throws darts at a wall and hopes it comes out alright.
Have them use tikz instead of svg, or have it write code that moves the cursor and draws the thing in paint.
Compositionality and visualization are generally much, much better at each new generation / release cycle.
It's fascinating how well models have internalized visualizing things without actually having joint embeddings / broad multimodality.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5009de-fff8-83ea-98ff-0da17d1d04...
I once used something like karpathy's auto-scientist to mutate the prompts and rank them with a vison model. Some of the winners where pretty neat. I think they have a lot more style than the gpt-5.6 ones. https://xcancel.com/xundecidability/status/20449185674144196...
A skilled human artist wouldn't have both legs in front of the bike, or a single straight line representing both leg's crank arms.
Dead internet theory? Semi-random parroting by real people? Or something else.
I assume multimodal models can do it already do it today if constantly asked "make it better"
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=pelican+1...
Also would be good to have a tool where users can select models and instantly see each model's generated pelicans. That will make it easy to compare the output of different models.
Doing it repeatedly crosses into harassment, and you've done it more than 3 times now - e.g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504823
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504654
So please especially stop doing that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
HN search shows 21 comments in the past month from simonw+pelican: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...
You can choose to look the other way but 3 comments out of 21, where 2 were kind of the same one on the same day, and 27 days ago... But you say "repeatedly crosses into harassment" as if I'm a troll chasing him around.
I was caring about the quality of this site with my 18 year old account... Unbelievable.
But as you bless him, I give up. It's your site. Quite a bummer after I defended you many times over the years, though. I remember in the beginning your interventions were not generally welcome.
Edit:
His comment is now 12th in this thread and there are comments saying his pelican SVG test is pointless. At least there's some sanity with other users. Or are they harassing him, too?
Sadly his other comment on Hy3 thread is still the top comment. And of course it also has a link to his site. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48848950
Nice to see you did the quality level comparisons and did three passes.
I've been using that technique myself on my image gen reviews[1] and it also works well in presentations and for personal study.
[1] https://generative-ai.review/2025/12/beast-mode-activated-op...