Using Blender with coding agents on macOS
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison
Blender can now be steered by coding agents on a Mac. Simon Willison used ChatGPT Codex to make a pelican ride a bicycle, then kept polishing it.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Simon Willison says he’s been having fun with Blender inside ChatGPT Codex on his Mac, and the setup is refreshingly low-friction. The trick, he writes, is to install the full Mac app from blender.org and point the agent at /Applications/Blender. Then you ask it to render something absurd, like a pelican riding a bicycle.
That first prompt got the scene started. Willison then pushed it further with two follow-ups: add a background and more flair, then make it “a whole lot better.” The result was an image generated through Blender’s Python API.
The interesting part isn’t the pelican. It’s how ordinary this workflow sounds. No special integration, no long setup story, just a desktop app, a coding agent, and a clear prompt. Blender is already a serious tool on its own; with an agent in the loop, it starts to look a lot more like a playground for quick experiments.
And the whole thing lands in that sweet spot where AI is useful without pretending to be magic. The agent is not inventing 3D art from nothing. It’s driving a real application through code, which is a much more grounded party trick.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of AI use that actually deserves the attention: not another chatbot sermon, but a tool doing work inside software people already use. Open models and closed ones both love a demo, but the real test is whether they can survive contact with messy desktop apps and still produce a pelican on a bike. That’s the bar now. Not poetry, just output.
Read more about this at: Simon Willison’s Weblog