Small tool shop, burning VC money, true. "Tiny part of the Python ecosystem" is an understatement given how much impact uv has made alone.

As a point of information: Astral did not, in fact, burn through its VC money. I agree that dev tools are difficult to monetize, though.

(Source: I'm an Astral employee.)

UV is arguably this decade's most important addition to the python ecosystem. They are a small, but they are important.

uv is the best thing to happen to package management in Python.

It's not perfect, but it is light-years better than what preceded it.

I jumped ship to it and have not looked back. (So have many of my clients).

> Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit.

I'm on the fence about cancelling my JetBrains subscription I've had for nearly 10 years now. I just don't use it much. Zed and Claude Code cover all my needs, the only thing I need is a serious DataGrip alternative, but I might just sit down with Claude and build one for myself.

They were hyped here without any pushback. Maybe OpenAI thinks the Astral folks will now evangelize and foist Codex and ChatGPT onto the open source "community".

People need to be very careful about resisting. OpenAI wants to make everyone unemployed, works with the Pentagon, steals IP, and copyright whistleblowers end up getting killed under mysterious circumstances.

That was my feeling - more than 'owning' uv etc I could see this as being about getting people onboard who had a proven track record delivering developer tooling that was loved enough to get wide adoption

This is so dystopian… they built something that worked and now are being “acquihired” into oblivion, and we’re supposed to be happy about it? I’m glad a few of the early people just got rich I guess, but it seems like a terrible system overall.

Uv is the defacto way to do projects. Ty is really really good. Ruff is the defacto linter. I mean they’ve earned a lot of clout.

That's kind of like saying Cargo is a small part of the Rust ecosystem.

It's not there yet, but it's getting there.

> tiny part of the Python ecosystem

https://xkcd.com/2347/

uv and ruff is not tiny part anymore, its growing fast

> this type of stuff really makes me doubt their AGI claims, why would they bother with this stuff if they were confident of having AGI within the next few years?

because AGI doesn't grow in a cage, it requires a piece of software running somewhere. someone has to build both to get that happen. that is like a high school level question.

> they've been cloning features of their API customers and adding them to their core products since day 1

Is this not just the strategy of all platforms. Spy on all customers, see what works for them and copy the most valuable business models. Amazon does that with all kinds of products.

Platforms will just grow to own all the market and hike prices and lower quality, and pay close to nothing to employees. This is why we used to have monopoly regulations before being greedy became a virtue.

> If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.

1. For the record: the GPL is entirely dependent on copyright.

2. If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.

While the license is important, it's the community that plays the key role for me. VC funder open source is not the same as community developed open source. The first can very quickly disappear because of something like a aquihire, the second has more resilience and tends to either survive and evolve, or peter out as the context changes.

I'm careful to not rely too heavily on VC funded open source whenever I can avoid it.

The biggest scam the mega-clouds and the Githubs ever pulled was convincing open source developers that the GPL was somehow out of vogue and BSD/MIT/Apache was better.

All so they could just vacuum it all up and resell it with impunity.

Since when has GPL stopped any company from doing so? I'd genuinely be happy to hear of a single time someone was actually pressed about their GPL compliance after FSF v. Cisco, it's like some immaterial sword of Damocles, the entire weight of which is the shame of losing face, which is fleeting in a society post-appeal-to-authority.

A GPL license helps but if support for a dependency is pulled you'll likely end up needing to divert more resources to maintain it anyways. There really isn't any guarantee against this cost - you either pay someone else to maintain it and hope they do a good job, build it in house and become an "also that thing" company, or follow a popular project without financially supporting it and just hope other people pick up your slack.

Preferring GPL licensed software means that you're immune to a sudden cut off of access so it's always advisable - but it's really important to stay on top of dependencies and be willing to pay the cost if support is withdrawn. So GPL helps but it isn't a full salve.

As if there will be hiring in the fullness of time.

There will come a day when you can will an entire business into existence at the press of a button. Maybe it has one or two people overseeing the business logic to make sure it doesn't go off the rails, but the point is that this is a 100x reduction in labor and a 100,000x speed up in terms of delivery.

They'll price this as a $1M button press.

Suddenly, labor capital cannot participate in the market anymore. Only financial capital can.

Suddenly, software startups are no longer viable.

This is coming.

The means of production are becoming privatized capital outlays, just like the railroads. And we will never own again.

There is nothing that says our careers must remain viable. There is nothing that says our output can remain competitive, attractive, or in demand. These are not laws.

Knowledge work may be a thing of the past in ten years' time. And the capital owners and hyperscalers will be the entirety of the market.

If we do not own these systems (and at this point is it even possible for open source to catch up?), we are fundamentally screwed.

I strongly believe that people not seeing this - downplaying this - are looking the other way while the asteroid approaches.

This. Is. The. End.

If LLMs turn out to be such a force multiplier, the way to fight it is to ensure that there are open source LLMs.

If it goes bad? It’s too late by that point. And how is open source going to compete with billions of investment dollars?

What would the new open source projects do differently from the "old" ones? I don't think you can forbid model training on your code if your project is open source.

And how likely is that?

Once you’re acquired you have to do what the boss says. That means prioritizing your work to benefit the company. That is often not compatible with true open source.

How frequently do acquired projects seriously maintain their independence? That is rare. They may have more resources but they also have obligations.

And this doesn’t even touch on the whole commodification and box out strategy that so many tech giants have employed.

What do you mean? MIT is essentially as open as you can get. The worst that can happen is that they will relicense, eventually, to force big users to pay, but when that happens everybody knows how it goes: some consortium of other big companies forks it and continues development as if nothing happened.

Let us assume AGI never comes. I don't plan scenarios for when aliens land, why should I for AGI? It's not particularly close.

Could you say the same about the Chrome browser? Google is using it to EEE the web (Embrace, Extend and Extend it till it's a monstrosity that nobody else can manage). That's pretty antagonistic. But did people change?

The exact opposite has started: every single developer with an LLM subscription now has 45 variations of any foundational tool and library, to cater to their weird use-case, because it was easier for the LLM to just modify it rather than adapting to it. Almost nobody upstreams such improvements (or they are too niche anyway).

The ecosystem will be this way for a while, if not the new normal.

What language is universally better than Python? I don't think Python is perfect, but it is definitely one of the best languages out there. It is elegant and it is has a huge ecosystem of libraries, frameworks and tutorials. There is a lot of battle-tested software in Python that is running businesses.

> cost of significantly better languages is essentially free

Is it? We still need meatspace humans to vet what these AI agents produce. Languages like C++ / Rust etc still require huge cognitive overhead relative to Python & that will not change anytime soon.

Unless the entire global economy can run on agents with minimal human supervision someone still has to grapple with the essential complexity of getting a computer to do useful things. At least with Python that complexity is locked away within the CPython interpreter.

Also an aside, when has a language ever gotten traction based solely on its technical merits? Popularity is driven by ease-of-use, fashion, mindshare, timing etc.

Your stance is aggressive and provocative, but no less so than the challenge AI poses to software developers in general. I think what you say should be seriously entertained.

And as someone who loves Python and has written a lot of it, I tend to agree. It's increasingly clear the way to be productive with AI coding and the way to make it reliable is to make sure AI works within strong guardrails, with testsuites, etc. that combat and corral the inherent indeterminism and problems like prompt injection as much as possible.

Getting help from the language - having the static tooling be as strict and uncompromising as possible, and delegating having to deal with the pain to AI - seems the right way.

It's such a laughable take. First of all a language is never getting popular simply because it's good. Actually most used languages are usually terrible.[0]

Secondly it's non factual. Python's market share grew in 2025[1][2][3]. Probably driven by AI demand.

[0]: even truer for natural languages.

[1]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#most-popular...

[2]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...

[3]: https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

That's an interesting take, but I'm not sure 'easy to write' is the only advantage.

There is also a really good ecosystem of libraries, especially for scientific computing. My experience has been that Claude can write good c++ code, but it's not great about optimization. So, curated Python code can often be faster than an AI's reimplementation of an algorithm in c++.

I feel like this is a relatively hot take. Python has advantages beyond being easy to write. It's simple. It can do just about anything any other language can do. It's not the most performant on its own, but it's performant enough for 99% of use cases, and in the 1% you can write a new or use an existing C library instead. Its simplicity and ease of adoption make python very well represented in the training data.

If I ask an LLM or agentic AI to build something and don't specify what language to use, I'd wager that it'll choose python most of the time. Casual programmers like academics or students who ask ChatGPT to help them write a function to do X are likely to be using Python already.

I'm not a Python evangelist by any means but to suggest that AI is going to kill Python feels like a major stretch to me.

EDIT: when I say that Python can do anything any other language can do, that's with the adage in mind. Python is the second best language for every task.

Isn't that also an advantage for LLMs? Apart from more available data.

Let's see how it plays out. My current assumption is that degrees and CVs will become more important in the workplace. Things like good architecture, maintainability, coherence, they are all hard to measure. A true 10x developer without a college degree will lose to the PhD without any hard skills. And these types only speak python, so they will instruct the AI to type python. Or maybe they'll vibecode rust and elixir, I don't know. But the cynic in me strongly thinks this will make all our bullshitty jobs way more bullshitty, and impostors will profit the most.

hilariously bold take with no evidence to support the claim

Absolutely agree with this. I'm hoping via advent of agentic, Rust dominates in the next few years. It may even cause Wasm to be dominant as the new "applet" language.