alt Hacker NewsPelican from a few days ago: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/6/hy3/ - I was using the free tier on OpenRouter, which expires on July 21st.
I tried the preview model 41 days ago and got a pelican with a "change pelican color" button: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/hy3-preview-pel...
Replies
I have been overly critical and arguing in bad faith about your writing in the past. As well as negative towards you, which in turn was breeding a bad environment.
While I dont really enjoy LLMs, you did help me realize my unreasonable feelings as well as realize the occupation (and the joys I got from it) is essentially dead from it’s previous iteration and that I should let go and just join in the “I’m doing it for the money and attention” crowd. I will still just hand code my own projects and not use LLMs when I can.
I think it’s cool you started the pelican meme however useful it really is even if only aesthetically.
Recently tried the pelican test on GPT-OSS which was probably one of the best local models of 2025. So cool to see how models have improved in the SVG pelican!