datasette-ip-rate-limit 0.1a0
Simon Willison · Simon Willison · 2026-05-14
Simon Willison releases datasette-ip-rate-limit 0.1a0, a configurable IP-based rate limiting plugin for Datasette built using OpenAI's Codex to protect datasette.io from aggressive automated web crawlers.
Appears in
Extraction
Topics: datasetterate-limitingai-assisted-programmingopen-source-toolsweb-crawlers
Claims
- The datasette.io website was being significantly disrupted by poorly-behaved automated crawlers.
- Willison used Codex (GPT-5.5 xhigh) to build the rate limiting plugin rather than writing it manually.
- The plugin supports configurable rules with per-path matching, time windows, maximum request counts, and block durations.
- The alpha release is already deployed in production on datasette.io.
Key quotes
The datasette.io site was being hammered by poorly-behaved crawlers, so I had Codex (GPT-5.5 xhigh) build a configurable rate limiting plugin to block IPs that were hammering specific areas of the site too quickly.