Claude just wowed me in a very mundane way. I wanted a custom icon to use in Notion, so I requested that Claude make me a 64×64 PNG”:

“a dark purplish-blue square with slightly rounded corners, and a white capital F inside.”

This it did, and I was 100% satisfied. (See the attached image.)

When I interrogated it about how it did that, it turned out it had written a Python program to draw the icon, using the “Pillow” library.

Here's the part for the program that draws the white "F":

d.rectangle([x0, y0, x0 + t, y1], fill=white) # stem
d.rectangle([x0, y0, x1, y0 + t], fill=white) # top bar
d.rectangle([x0, 29 * S - t // 2 + S, 42 * S, 29 * S + t // 2 + S], fill=white) # middle bar

It didn't use Pillow's text-drawing feature, it built the F out of rectangles. When I asked why, it said:

“I didn’t check whether the sandbox had any fonts installed, and I didn’t want the script to fail on a missing font file. Drawing the F from rectangles has no external dependency, so it works on any machine with Pillow.”

You can't trust anything Claude says about what it was thinking, but this is a really plausible answer, and I believe it is probably correct.