5 million oil & gas wells mapped across the US. Smoothly aggregated heatmap when zoomed out, fading to individual wells when zoomed in. High-precision energy industry insights, modern geospatial infrastructure.

If you work in geospatial, PMTiles is one of the technologies you need to know going into 2026. This past year, I wrote an R package to help you get started. Learn how here:

Learn more about geosam:

Interactive energy infrastructure analytics powered by the {geosam} R package. Find solar farms on a satellite image in West Texas, click points to segment the imagery & extract shapes. Save the result then get back an sf object in a single step with area calculated for you.

Innovative geospatial + AI tools for oil & gas: https://t.co/xXZA5iBkWi And the open-source tech that powers it:

5 million oil & gas wells mapped across the US. Smoothly aggregated heatmap when zoomed out, fading to individual wells when zoomed in. High-precision energy industry insights, modern geospatial infrastructure.

I know we used to make fun of Google's AI overviews - but it's pretty impressive how much it's improved in a short period of time. I released this R package Wednesday.

Detecting the letter "O" at @uoregon's athletic fields using @Meta's Segment Anything Model 3, @Mapbox imagery, and the {geosam} #rstats package. SAM3 does quite well - all you need is the text prompt "the letter o"! #GoDucks

Andrej Karpathy‘s comments on agency matter more than ever in a post-Opus 4.5 world It’s not so much a matter of can you or can’t you anymore It’s now a question of will you or won’t you Agency in today’s labor market is the most important skill you can cultivate

West Texas energy infrastructure identified from satellite imagery using zero-shot image segmentation. Shown: Well pads from simple text prompts; Draw a box around a wind turbine, find the others in the view; Click a solar farm, segment the area.

In the age of LLMs, open source software and their developers are more important than ever. When LLMs write code, they will typically do so with open source tools, which are still maintained by humans. If you use LLMs to code, find ways to support the open source you rely on.

Many thanks to @AIatMeta for open-sourcing SAM3, and to @giswqs whose work inspired this project!

Introducing {geosam}: an R toolkit for @Meta's Segment Anything Model 3 - Detect objects in satellite imagery with text prompts - Interactive Shiny tools with draw & click-to-identify - Works with @Mapbox, @Esri, @MapTiler - Use regular images too! https://t.co/MEYujjjb1D

The "explore" tool in the new {geosam} R package puts Meta's powerful SAM3 directly in the hands of #rstats users. Shown here: we supply the model six prompts to find in an image; it finds all six within an interactive viewer with pan/zoom. Release coming soon!

We're building practical AI tools for the energy industry at Clearfork Intelligence: https://t.co/xXZA5iAN6K

Oil & gas infrastructure detection across 270 square miles of SE New Mexico with R, {geosam}, & SAM3. Well pads found from a bounding box and a simple text prompt. It's not perfect, as you'll see false positives - but it's a great starting point for filtering to what you need.

Nearly 800 swimming pools identified from @Mapbox satellite imagery with @Meta's SAM3 in a section of Beverly Hills. In the soon-to-be-released {geosam} R package: review results by confidence level, filter, then export. This is shaping into a tool for serious applied work.

This would have *never* happened without Opus 4.5; it would have likely faded into the background as other obligations crept in. Now, I can develop at a speed that keeps my focus and motivation while Opus takes care of the mundane stuff.

Tried and failed many times. LLMs got it over the finish line. Most recently, I'm building a new R package, {geosam}, wrapping Meta's Segment Anything Model 3. I got the idea Monday, I have a working prototype today, and I'll open source what I have next week.

I've been guilty of this too: start an exciting new project, see it taper off. AI - and especially now with Opus 4.5 - can accelerate projects to increase their likelihood of getting done. I'm seeing this acutely in my own work. I wanted to build mapgl for 10 years.