datasette-ip-rate-limit 0.1a0

The detail worth sitting with is that Willison shipped this as an alpha release under active crawler pressure, not as a polished tool built in advance. That distinction matters: the plugin was written reactively, in production conditions, which is a different claim than a developer using AI to build something at leisure.

This story has no direct anchor in our current archive, so it belongs to a broader pattern worth naming on its own terms. Willison is one of the more rigorous public documenters of practical AI coding workflows, and this instance sits in a growing category of infrastructure maintainers using LLMs not for greenfield features but for defensive, operational responses to abuse. The Codex and GPT-4.5 lineage matters here: the speed at which a solo maintainer can now produce configurable, deployable middleware is genuinely different from two years ago, even if the underlying task (IP rate limiting) is decades old. The novelty is in the response latency, not the concept.

Watch whether datasette-ip-rate-limit moves out of alpha with documented false-positive rates or bypass incidents reported by users. If it stalls at alpha with no follow-up posts from Willison on real-world performance, that would suggest the AI-assisted prototype solved the immediate problem but wasn't robust enough to generalize.