Simon Willison tests Claude Opus 5.5's composing ability

On 6 October 2026, Simon Willison published a test log: he asked Claude Opus 5.5 to design a simple text music format and build an artifact that could play it, and required the sample track to reach the standard of the original Monkey Island. The result was closer to the Monkey Island theme than he expected, and surprisingly good in quality. He therefore speculates that composing with text models may resemble earlier 3D graphics capabilities, a new ability that has emerged only in recent months, but more experiments are needed to verify it.

Written by AI from the reports · updated 10 d ago