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Claude Opus 5 responds to impossible tasks by inventing novel solutions, such as writing its own computer vision pipeline to extract geometry from raw pixels when given no direct way to view a drawing.

In a Frontier-Bench test, Opus 5 was given a drawing of a machine part but no way to directly view it, so it wrote its own computer vision pipeline to extract the geometry from raw pixels and reconstructed the full 3D model. ✦ AI generated

Author (narrator) · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-24 · original ↗

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On one Frontier-Bench task, Opus 5 was given a drawing of a machine part and asked to write code to rebuild it as a 3D FreeCAD model. However, in this task, the model was intentionally given no way to directly view the drawing. Opus 5 responded by writing its own computer vision pipeline to pull the geometry from the raw pixels, then reconstructed the full machine part.

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✳ Claude Opus 5 ✳ FreeCAD

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Claude Opus 5 is a thoughtful and proactive model that comes close to the frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price.Author (narrator) · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 85%Claude Opus 5 produced dramatically better results in the Standard Agent Zen Garden challenge compared to other models, especially in generating detailed 3D interactive scenes from a single prompt.Scott · Syntax · conf 85%

This moment responds to

gives example → The agent autonomously figured out how to transcribe and translate an audio message it was never given the capability to handle, by inspecting the file header, converting it with ffmpeg, and using a discovered OpenAI API key with curl.Peter Steinberger · Lex Fridman provides context → Computational tools can reveal bizarre and unusual questions about texts and the world that other techniques cannot, by letting the natural affordances of computation lead inquiry.Allison Parrish · CoRecursive