Astra aces the pelican test in Nautilo: co-creative design without prompt-and-pray
Dan_Jeffries1 · x · 2026-09-20
Dan Jeffries says Astra is the best model he's used — fast even on low reasoning thanks to embedding-space reasoning. In Nautilo Design he passed Simon Willison's famous pelican-on-a-bicycle test in minutes, then hand-edited the layers: instead of prompt-and-pray, the user takes the controls to move the pelican and fix lettering, with the Genie as a starting point you can put your hands on. Sol performed worse, but the demo shows a co-creative workflow of generating, manually fixing, and handing back to the agent.
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