What's this about?
Willison's notes on Fable 5.1: at Max thinking level he got the best SVG pelican he has had from any Anthropic model — at a cost of $3.30 for the one image — and then had it animate the result.
Why a pelican riding a bicycle?
It is Willison's personal benchmark, run on every new model for years. The point is that it is deliberately absurd and definitely not in any training set as a solved problem: drawing a specific animal in a specific pose, in raw SVG, with no visual feedback. The model must reason about geometry it cannot see. Its value is longitudinal — the same prompt, every model, for years, giving a comparison no leaderboard provides.
Why is it worth noticing?
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- $3.30 for one SVG at Max effort is a concrete, quotable data point about what the top effort setting costs.
- "Best I've had from any Anthropic model" from someone with years of the same comparison carries more weight than a benchmark row.
- The animation follow-up is the part that suggests genuine improvement — editing your own generated SVG coherently is harder than producing it.