Summary
My comment on The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford — Hacker News. OK, this comment convinced me to give that a shot. Here's a thing I made in Three.js this morning - a Nudibranch themed Faberge Egg: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg... (77KB) I just asked Claude (Opus 5.5 Medium running in regular Claude Chat) to port that to Vanilla JS, in the same thread where it had built it, and got this: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg... (98KB) They aren't identical - you can see what Claude said about that in the transcript (I don't fully understand why it differed): https://claude.ai/share/e56d163e-2793-4677-aa11-191d5058b414 But yeah, it turns out Claude Opus 5.5 is perfectly capable of 3D modeling in Vanilla JS + WebGL without Three.js. In eyeballing the code I find the Three.js slightly easier to understand myself, but I rarely look at the code for these 3D projects so that isn't a particularly big deal. Tags: claude , javascript ,…
Original text(via Simon Willison)
9th November 2026
Comment My comment on The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford — Hacker News
OK, this comment convinced me to give that a shot.
Here's a thing I made in Three.js this morning - a Nudibranch themed Faberge Egg: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg... (77KB)
I just asked Claude (Opus 5.5 Medium running in regular Claude Chat) to port that to Vanilla JS, in the same thread where it had built it, and got this: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg... (98KB)
They aren't identical - you can see what Claude said about that in the transcript (I don't fully understand why it differed): https://claude.ai/share/e56d163e-2793-4677-aa11-191d5058b414
But yeah, it turns out Claude Opus 5.5 is perfectly capable of 3D modeling in Vanilla JS + WebGL without Three.js.
In eyeballing the code I find the Three.js slightly easier to understand myself, but I rarely look at the code for these 3D projects so that isn't a particularly big deal.
The text above was extracted automatically from the source page and may miss images, tables or code blocks. The original is authoritative.
Published by Simon Willison
This site only summarises and aggregates; copyright stays with the original author. Headlines and summaries follow the source — where they differ, the original wins.
Read the original ↗ 
Newshot