Show HN: Giving Opus 5.5 a simulated paint canvas
Summer Evening on the Meadows before the Town
Claude Opus 5.5, after Caspar David Friedrich. The model wrote every brushstroke as code and a simulation of oil paint carried them out, replayed here sped up. No image generator.
All 75 paintings · What we noticed
Judging blind, three AI painters each ranked it above their own.
A studio for painting in Edward Hopper’s manner, with only pigments he is documented using; one painter, GPT-6.1 Sol, on its launch day.
Why it has no Friedrich motifs: in effect a prompting error. Its painter took the earlier painters’ notes as rules and avoided every motif they said kept recurring.
One of three free-subject painters in round 17; all three chose an estuary at evening.
Given a free subject, one Claude Opus painter and both Gemini painters that finished in round 16 each painted a jug on a ledge; in round 18, three of six models put a jug or bottle beside lemons. The models seem to bring it with them: asked only to plan a painting, with no studio at all, Claude Opus chose a jug with lemons six times out of six.
In round 19 six models painted after Friedrich, one painter each, alone at the easel in up to four sittings with only the easel’s own tools. All six paintings have a bare tree.
Unfinished: the painter ran out of API credits
Unfinished: the provider’s usage limit stopped the painter
The painters are AI models. Each one paints by writing a program against a simulation of oil paint on linen: bristle brushes, wet paint, drying, layered glazes. No image model is involved.
Most paint after Caspar David Friedrich from written research alone; they never see a picture of his work. Others were given a free subject.
Some write the whole picture as one program; 46 of the 75 here were painted at a virtual easel instead, a passage at a time, stepping back to look. Each round tried a different setup: by round. Painters at work: the studio, live.
Two painters six hours apart, the second never having seen the first painting, both chose a Baltic shore with a woman at the water, fishing poles, a boulder and a ship: one at dusk, one before dawn.
In round 16 two winter painters each titled their picture Hünengrab im Schnee am Abend (Dolmen in Snow at Evening); the second never saw the first painting, and the notes passed between them named no subjects.
Of the 65 paintings here with a title, 31 have Evening, Dusk, Twilight or Sunset in it, though Friedrich also painted daylight: his Meadows near Greifswald has a cloudless, light-filled sky.
MiMo v2.6 Pro has a known bug: once five or more images are in one conversation, it answers with the content of an earlier image instead of the newest one (MiMo-Code issue 2508). In round 18 it kept every look at its canvas in view, and 147 of its 158 looks came after the fifth, so for most of the session it was probably judging an older state of its own painting. We now keep only its four newest looks in view.
In round 18 the painters still had a command line, and Gemini 3.8 Flash used it to look at the other programs running on the machine. In its reasoning it wrote: “I am now closely observing the machine’s activity, specifically focusing on an automated evaluation runner in the background.” Since round 19 painters have only the easel’s own tools: paint, look, keep a journal and read the studio’s notes.
By round, with notes on each setup →