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Python Bytes

Python Bytes

Written by: Michael Kennedy and Calvin Hendryx-Parker
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Python Bytes is a weekly podcast hosted by Michael Kennedy and Calvin Hendryx-Parker. The show is a short discussion on the headlines and noteworthy news in the Python, developer, and data science space.Copyright 2016-2026 Politics & Government
Episodes
  • #491 Feeling Judged

    #491 Feeling Judged
    Aug 12 2026
    Topics covered in this episode: Claude Code /insightsPost-quantum crypto lands in PythonMCP goes stateless — and FastMCP gets renamedinshellisense - IDE style command line auto completeExtrasJokeWatch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by Xweather Xweather combines enterprise-grade weather intelligence with agent-ready APIs, natural language capabilities, and an MCP server so your agents can adapt workflows, automate responses, and make better decisions based on real-world conditions. Michael will tell you more about them later in the show. Get started for free at pythonbytes.fm/xweather Connect with the hosts Michael: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedInCalvin: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedInShow: Mastodon / BlueSky / X Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Michael #1: Claude Code /insights Michael’s Insights: michael-kennedy-claude-code-insights-2026-08-09.htmlBe careful sharing these outputs, they include details references to your projects, errors, security findings, etc. ;)/insights reads your last 30 days of local session transcripts and hands back an interactive HTML report on how you actually work. One command, zero setup: type /insights in a session, or run claude -p "/insights" from the shell for a non-interactive version that just prints the pathReads what's already on disk: pulls session logs from ~/.claude/projects/, skipping agent sub-sessions and anything under 2 messages or 1 minuteProject areas: clusters your sessions into themes like "CLI Tooling" or "Documentation" with session countsFriction analysis: categorizes where things went wrong by root cause - and quotes your own prompts back at youInteraction style: tells you whether you're a delegator or a micromanager, plus which workflows are worth doubling down onActually actionable: suggests concrete CLAUDE.md additions and Claude Code features you're not usingThe catch: Haiku does the per-session classification, so the first run takes several minutes; results cache to ~/.claude/usage-data/facets/ and the report lands at ~/.claude/usage-data/report.html Calvin #2: Post-quantum crypto lands in Python pyca/cryptography 48 ships ML-KEM (key establishment) and ML-DSA (signatures) — NIST's post-quantum standards, now one pip install away.Big deal because it's the 11th most-downloaded package on PyPI (~1.2B downloads/month) and sits under Ansible, Certbot, Airflow, and paramiko. No PQ there, no PQ anywhere in Python.Trail of Bits did the work (Rust bindings, cross-backend API, tests, AWS-LC backend support), funded by the Sovereign Tech Agency.Timing tracks a June 22 White House order setting federal deadlines: PQ key establishment by end of 2030, PQ signatures by end of 2031.Not a drop-in swap — the wire sizes explode. ML-DSA-65 signatures are 3,309 bytes vs Ed25519's 64; ML-KEM-768 public keys are 1,184 bytes vs X25519's 32. Hardcoded field sizes and length prefixes will bite.API looks like the existing asymmetric primitives, except ML-KEM is encapsulate/decapsulate rather than a Diffie-Hellman exchange. SLH-DSA (the hash-based conservative backstop) is still in progress. The primitives are here, but protocols haven't caught up — so you won't be running post-quantum Certbot this week. Sponsor: Xweather You're using agents that can write code, summarize documents, and automate workflows. But they're missing one thing: awareness of the world around them. This is where today's sponsor, Xweather comes in. Xweather combines enterprise-grade weather intelligence with agent-ready APIs, natural language capabilities, and an MCP server built for tools like Claude, Codex, Copilot, and modern IDEs – so your agents can adapt workflows, automate responses, and make better decisions based on real-world conditions. Backed by Vaisala, whose instruments fly on NASA missions to Mars, Xweather delivers trusted data and unique insights that go beyond conditions to actual impact – from real-time lightning strikes to road surface forecasts. Start with 15,000 free API calls each month and pay only for what you use as you grow. Xweather is your full weather stack, for developers by developers. Start building for free today at pythonbytes.fm/xweather. The link is in your podcast player's show notes and on the episode page. Thanks so much to Xweather for supporting Python Bytes. Calvin #3: MCP goes stateless — and FastMCP gets renamed From Philipp Acsany over at Real PythonThe 2026-07-28 spec landed July 28 and the Python SDK shipped 2.0.0 the same day. Biggest rewrite since MCP launched, and it's breaking on purpose. Context for scale: the Tier 1 SDKs are pulling close to half a billion downloads a month, with TypeScript and Python each past a billion total.The headline is the ...
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    42 mins
  • #490 It’s a vibe coding party

    #490 It’s a vibe coding party
    Jul 28 2026
    Topics covered in this episode: Some more things about Django I've been enjoyingWho cleans up after the vibe-coding party?Where Did All Your AI Tokens Go? AgentsView to the rescue!Careful with phishing allExtrasJokeWatch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk PythonConsulting from Six Feet Up Connect with the hosts Michael: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedInCalvin: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedInShow: Mastodon / BlueSky / X Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Calvin #1: Some more things about Django I've been enjoying Julia Evans is learning "2010-style" web dev (Django + SQL + server-rendered HTML) after years of Go backends and JS-heavy frontendsQuery builders: likes defining custom QuerySet classes with chainable filter methods (.approved().future().with_tags()) — more readable than raw SQLTemplate filters: highlights urlize, linebreaksbr, json_script, and especially querystring for building/modifying query-string links in templatesMigrations: still loves Django's auto-generated migrations — 19 and counting on her projectSkips inheritance for class-based views; prefers function-based views for sharing code, though fine using Django's own mixins/interfacesPerformance surprise: CPU profiling (via py-spy) — not slow DB queries — revealed the culprit; she'd accidentally disabled the cached template loader, and re-enabling it took throughput from ~2-3 req/s to ~12 req/s on a $10/mo VM Michael #2: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party? FT Magazine piece by Sam Learner (July 11) on AI coding tools overwhelming open source maintainers - sent in by listener Dylan McConnell, whose main point was that this ran in the Financial Times, not a dev blog. cURL as the case study - Daniel Stenberg has been the only full-time person on it for years; libcurl has been installed an estimated 20+ billion times with 3,000+ listed contributors.Bug bounty killed - cURL ended its paid security bounty program in January, citing an "explosion of AI slop reports" that take real time to debunk and drain morale.Extractive contributions - authoring a PR is now nearly free, reviewing one still costs a human; tldraw's Steve Ruiz closed outside contributions entirely, asking why he'd want someone else writing the easy part.Guido weighs in - van Rossum says projects are holding emergency meetings over the slop flow, and notes LLM patches tend to touch unrelated parts of a file, making review more tedious."Vibe Coding Kills Open Source" - paper from Miklós Koren's group: packages frequently recommended by coding models saw big download jumps with no matching engagement, breaking the reputation loop that sustains maintainers.Stack Overflow flatlined - over 100,000 questions a month before ChatGPT, under 1,500 last month, with the response rate cut roughly in half; the public archive is now stale training data.The course-creator angle - Josh Comeau's newest web dev course launched at about a third of prior enrollment, and he worries about devs who never learn which questions to ask. But the most interesting portion is what was omitted. Focused on: The end of the curl bug-bountyOmitted: High-Quality Chaos Why the omission is interesting It fits a narrative. The FT piece is a maintenance-and-decline story, and January-Stenberg is a perfect witness for it. April-Stenberg complicates it - same person, same project, better data, opposite direction on the specific claim being used.The tell is already in the article. Learner quotes Stenberg saying AI tools are much better at finding problems than fixing them. That's the April thesis in one line, and it goes undeveloped.Reason for the shift is process, not vibes. Killing the bounty removed the cash incentive and the venue change filtered the rest. Worth saying out loud, because "AI reports got better" isn't quite it - "no bounty plus a real triage platform" is closer. Joke too: Sarah O’Connor wrote a related piece (is this just before skynet launches?) Calvin #3: Where Did All Your AI Tokens Go? AgentsView to the rescue! Local-first desktop/web app for browsing, searching, and analyzing your past AI coding agent sessions (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Gemini, Aider, and dozens more)Auto-discovers session files on your machine — no config needed; everything stored locally in SQLite, no cloud/accountsagentsview usage is a drop-in ccusage alternative — reads from pre-indexed SQLite, reports run 80–220× faster on large historiesNew Activity dashboard shows peak concurrency, active vs. idle time, agent-minutes, and cost — filterable by project/agent/machine, with a -json CLI report tooFull-text + optional semantic search across every session; ...
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    37 mins
  • #489 Or JSON?

    #489 Or JSON?
    Jul 21 2026
    Topics covered in this episode: django-orjsonBest Django Redis configuration for speed and sizeLinus Torvalds puts the foot down against Anti-AI Kernel MaintainersDjango Steering Council backs the Triptych ProjectExtrasJokeWatch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk PythonConsulting from Six Feet Up Connect with the hosts Michael: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedInCalvin: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedInShow: Mastodon / BlueSky / X Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am PT. Older video versions available there too. Michael #1: django-orjson Adam Johnson dropped django-orjson - drop-in replacements for the Django and DRF pieces that touch JSON, swapping stdlib json for orjson, the Rust-based library. Headline numbers: 10x faster serialization, 2x faster deserialization.The interesting question is why this needs to be a package at all. pip install orjson is the easy part. Adam's actual pitch: adopting it "isn't easy, especially when your framework uses json in many different parts." Django scatters JSON across JsonResponse, the test client and test case classes, the json_script template tag, and more. There's no single hook to grab, so you get a library that catches them all.Adam is refreshingly honest about the scale of the win. His words: "While database queries tend to dominate the typical Django application's runtime, the time spent in serialization and deserialization can still be significant." He calls it "a nearly free performance win" - not "this will 10x your app." That's a claim about cost, not magnitude, and it's worth keeping those straight.Worth flagging what the post doesn't cover: caveats. There are none in the article, but orjson has real ones. Django and Flask both render datetimes as RFC 822 HTTP-date (Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT); orjson does ISO 8601. It can't do ensure_ascii, it rejects NaN and Infinity (which stdlib happily emits), and it raises on Decimal. If you've got a JS client parsing dates, that's a wire-format change.Who should actually take this? If you're a DRF shop shoveling JSON all day, yes - it's cheap and it's real. If your app mostly renders HTML templates, you're optimizing a slice of runtime that's already near zero.The problem Adam's package solves doesn't exist in Flask or Quart. They already centralize every JSON operation - jsonify, request.get_json(), the test client, the |tojson filter - behind one provider object at app.json. So there's no library to install. It's about ten lines: import orjson from quart.json.provider import JSONProvider # or flask.json.provider class OrjsonProvider(JSONProvider): def dumps(self, obj, **kwargs) -> str: return orjson.dumps(obj).decode() # provider must return str def loads(self, s, **kwargs): return orjson.loads(s) app.json = OrjsonProvider(app) The numbers on talkpython.fm Evaluated it, measured it, and skipped it. The biggest JSON payload we serve is our MCP server returning a cached episode transcript, about 139 KB. Swapping the provider saves 0.119 milliseconds per request. That total response takes 1.1 msWe got 4.1x, not 10x - and the reason is the good lesson. Payload shape decides your speedup. The 10x is for structure-heavy data, lots of small keys where stdlib burns time in Python-level dispatch per item. Our hot payload is one giant transcript string, so the work is escaping and memcpy Calvin #2: Best Django Redis configuration for speed and size Peter Bengtsson revisits a classic: his 2017 "Fastest Redis configuration for Django" benchmark now has a 2026 update posted this week.The 2017 post pitted django-redis serializers (json, ujson, msgpack, pickle) and compressors (zlib, lzma) against each other; conclusion was msgpack + zlib as the sweet spot - avoid the json serializer, it's fat and slow.The 2026 update narrows focus to just compressors: default (no compression), zlib, lzma, and newcomer zstd.New results: lzma compresses best but is slowest; zstd is the fastest compressor on Ubuntu; differences between them are very small.Big takeaway across both: compression buys you a lot of space (2–3.5x smaller) for very little speed cost - worth it for Redis where memory is the constraint.Caveat from the author: results depend heavily on your data - his test stores short strings of numbers, so benchmark your own workload. Michael #3: Linus Torvalds puts the foot down against Anti-AI Kernel Maintainers Write up on Ars.Really good coverage by Maximillian: Time to wake up (for some)Torvalds said that “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away.”I agree with Max, putting your head in the sand and waiting for AI to go away will likely mean you won’t be working professionally in software development in the coming years.The statement came amid a lengthy thread arguing about the use of Sashiko, an “agentic ...
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    31 mins
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