simonw/pedalican
Simon Willison Simon Willison
A developer created a custom animated pet for Codex Desktop by using GPT-5.6 Sol and gpt-image-2 to generate sprite assets for a pelican riding a bicycle. The AI system required multiple rounds of image generation and refinement, starting with a detailed reference prompt that specified dimensions of 192x208 pixels and a magenta chroma-key background for animation. The resulting assets—including sprite sheets and animation loops—are now published in the developer's GitHub repository, with the underlying image generation and pet creation skills available as open-source Apache 2.0 licensed code.
Why it matters
simonw/pedalican Clearly I wasn't paying attention when these were first announced back in May, but today I accidentally activated a "pet" in Codex Desktop - a little animated robot, reminiscent of Clippy - and then learned you can create your own. So I did, and now I have a cute little pelican on a bicycle bouncing around my desktop giving me updates on my Codex tasks. Your browser does not support HTML5 video. The most interesting thing about this process was watching how the custom pet was created. I told it I wanted a custom pet that was a pelican riding a bicycle and GPT-5.6 Sol xhigh did the rest of the work, using several rounds with gpt-image-2 to generate the necessary sprite assets. I had it make extensive notes and record all of the intermediary steps. My GItHub repo includes every generated image and combined sprite sheet, plus GIFs for each of the animation loops such as this one, called waving.gif: That GIF was compiled from a single image generated by gpt-image-2 that lo
