Show HN: Pelican-bicycle alternatives (updated for 2026)

ttkgally about 2 hours ago 5 commentsRead Article on gally.net

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In November and December 2025, inspired by Simon Willison’s pelican-riding-a-bicycle benchmark, I had some then-current LLMs create SVGs from thirty similar prompts, such as “Generate an SVG of an octopus operating a pipe organ.” Simon mentioned that experiment on his blog [1].

Nine months have passed and much stronger models have been released, so I tried the experiment again today. The linked site shows the results.

Running ten of the prompts through six models at OpenRouter cost about twenty dollars, so I stopped there for now.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/25/

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Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

vova_hn2•15 minutes ago

Website looks very cool, Fable's octopus-organist looks very cute, but I feel like this benchmark (generate an SVG by a short and slightly ridiculous description) in general has been completely Goodharted [0].

I think they all just added a bunch of similar tasks to their training sets, so we cannot judge true emergent capabilities of the models anymore.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

samayashar•37 minutes ago

All models are pretty good now at generating these images. Back in the day, I remember experimenting with the pelican images and most of the models couldn't align the legs with the wheels. Right now as well, GPT messed up an octopus leg by originating it through the instrument rather than the octopus itself.

I think that intertwining two entities (living/non-living) is still challenging but overall they're pretty sound.

sajithdilshan•15 minutes ago

Interesting, out of all examples Gemini 3.8 is the best for me. Also the image style is different and more vibrant than others

sceptic123•10 minutes ago

> An elephant typing on a typewriter

A monkey, surely?

steinvakt2•about 1 hour ago

Feels like google has a different training set than the others?