Simon Willison tested AI music composition with Claude Opus 5.5 and made Scrimshaw Jukebox

Simon Willison asked Claude Opus 5.5 to design a simple text music format and build an artifact that could play it, and also required the sample track to reach the musical level of the first generation of The Secret of Monkey Island. The resulting product turned out to be more Monkey Island-themed than he expected, but worked surprisingly well. From this he guessed that composition ability might, like the earlier 3D graphics ability, be a new capability that emerged in text models only in recent months, but more experiments are needed to verify.