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simonwtoday at 1:30 AM0 repliesview on HN

Comparing with Muse Glimmer is a good idea. I ran the same exact HTML tool generating prompt against both Glimmer 30B and Qwen 3.8 27B. Results:

Qwen: https://gist.github.com/simonw/121ad098860028b2fab603fa12da1... - 17,576 reasoning tokens, produced this HTML result: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/qwen-over-think...

Glimmer: https://gist.github.com/simonw/51e8ddb2ee597a5005fa63bd4927d... 1,021 reasoning tokens, this HTML: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/glimmer-bbox.ht... - ugly but functional.

In both cases paste in the URL https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/two-pelicans-on... to see them work.

Both applications work correctly and fulfill the requirements. The Qwen one (which used the default xhigh reasoning setting) is massively over-engineered. The Glimmer one used whatever their default in LM Studio is and I would argue is a tiny bit under-engineered.

Weirdly the Glimmer one doesn't work with images on other domains like https://static.inaturalist.org/photos/714731804/large.jpg - it fails with a CORS error, but you don't need CORS to load images and detect their width and height, and the Qwen one handles that URL just fine.

That's because Glimmer added this unnecessary line:

  img.crossOrigin = 'anonymous';