The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford
The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford
After commenting on the Hacker News discussion of Paul Ford's "The Web Is More Than Enough", Simon Willison ran a hands-on test, using Claude Opus 5.5 Medium to port the sea-slug-themed Faberge Egg project he had built that morning with Three.js over to Vanilla JS.
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.
Source: Simon Willison · simonwillison.net