Pelican Rides a Bicycle

Below are two SVG solutions to the Simon Willison's benchmark: "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle."

Claude Sonnet 3.5:

Claude-Code:

What Changed?!

As agentic gen/ai exploded in 2025, it felt like Willison's benchmark became a solvable problem if we used these new agentic powers: skills, sub-agents, tool-use and more. Using Claude-Code, I built a pipeline that now solves this problem.

The Github repo github.com/0x6a77/pelican-rides-a-bicycle let's you replicate this work and see an example of Claude-Code skills with tool-calling.

Return to ZeroDiff

After a near decade-long break, I've returned to ZeroDiff with a new perspective: it isn't just for hardware, it's a universal approach to product design and iteration. When we got clobbered in 2016 I needed a break, so I became a contractor with a focus on cloud compute, systems programming and data systems. I shaped that work into a what I thought might be a startup, Karrots, but with two kids in college I needed to give everyone a couple years break from startup stress and grind.

Eventually I want to return to robots and hardware, but because my life these days is mostly systems software at scale, I want to share some of the way that I have applied ZeroDiff to software over the years. The goal now is to run more formal experiments and write about them.