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Simon Willison’s Weblog

simonwillison.net · 5,293 words · saved by 8 readers

I wrote a lot this week. I also did some fun research into new options for self-hosting vector maps and pushed out several new releases of plugins. I saw a post about Protomaps on Hacker News. It’s absolutely fantastic technology. The Protomaps PMTiles file format lets you bundle together vector tiles in a single file which is designed to be queried using HTTP range header requests. This means you can drop a single 107GB file on cloud hosting and use it to efficiently serve vector maps to clients, fetching just the data they need for the current map area. Even better than that, you can create your own subset of the larger map covering just the area you care about. I tried this out against my hometown of Half Moon Bay ond get a building-outline-level vector map for the whole town in just a 2MB file! You can see the result (which also includes business listing markers from Overture maps) at simonw.github.io/hmb-map. Lots more details of how I built this, including using Vite as a build t

Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison’s Weblog On jailbreaking 14 python 1,261 datasette-agent 17 coding-agents 211 micropython 9 ... Sponsored by: Microsoft - Agent projects stall between demo and production. Microsoft's MVP checklist closes that gap. Try it Entries Links Quotes Notes Guides Elsewhere June 19, 2026 The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. [...] Maybe the idealized form of MCP is just an auth gateway for the API and nothing else. That’d still be a wi

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