Summary & Key Takeaways ​

• Simon Willison created a custom animated desktop pet named "Pedalican" using OpenAI's Codex Desktop.
• GPT-5.6 Sol xhigh generated the pet's concept and orchestrated the asset creation.
• GPT-image-2 was used to generate the necessary sprite assets for animation.
• The process involved multiple rounds of image generation and prompt refinement.
• Key implementation details, including hatch-pet and imagegen skills, are open source.
• The article includes all generated images, sprite sheets, and animation GIFs.
• This demonstrates AI's capability in generating game-ready assets from text prompts.

Our Commentary ​

This is just delightful. I love seeing AI used for genuinely fun, creative projects like this, rather than just optimizing ad spend. The detailed breakdown of the prompt engineering and image generation steps is super valuable. It makes me wonder what other small, quirky tools we could build with these capabilities. The open-source aspect is a huge win, too.