Simon WillisonSunday · September 6, 2026FREE

Using Blender with coding agents on macOS

In a TIL post, Simon Willison describes using Blender with coding agents on macOS. He observes that modern frontier models have become very good at using Blender, capable of producing .blend files that can be edited in Blender itself, and also rendering images and even movies by rendering image sequences and combining them with ffmpeg. He details his experience using ChatGPT Codex on his Mac, noting that getting it to work with coding agents is straightforward: install the full Mac application from blender.org and run a prompt like "Use the already install /Applications/Blender to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle." He followed up with prompts to add a background and flair, then to make it better, resulting in an image generated via Blender's Python API. The post is tagged with topics including Blender, coding agents, and GPT-6 Astra.