Latest episode: #566 State of the art in Python 2026
Which of your Python tools would you still pick if you started fresh today? For a long time, the answer was easy. The stack felt settled. AI has reopened almost every one of those choices. Some tools got faster. Others got replaced outright. On this episode, a panel takes stock of the state of the art in Python for 2026. Calvin Hendryx-Parker is CTO and co-founder of Six Feet Up. Pat Decker works in DevOps at Hibu. Reuven Lerner has trained Python developers for 15 years. Sydney Runkle does product management for open source at LangChain. One of them barely opens an editor anymore. Listen in to hear the surprising replacement.
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The most popular Python project you've probably never heard of has 252,000 GitHub stars and merged over 1,800 pull requests in a single week. It's Hermes, a self-hosted AI agent you program just by talking to it. And it never clocks out. It runs 24/7 on a box in your house, wakes up every 15 minutes, keeps your YouTube channel in sync, and has your morning briefing ready before you're up. Mine started as a few config files. A few months later, it's 16,000 files of skills, memories, and tools it built for itself, all while I wasn't watching. Jeff Triplett joins me to explore this honestly weird but kind of amazing world. And yes, Hermes has a few words for you, too.
Where does your Python code actually run? A server in Virginia? A container in Frankfurt? Pyodide put Python into the browser. Cloudflare put the browser into the server. Combine the two and you get Python Workers, now generally available. My guests are Hood Chatham, Gyeongjae Choi, and Dominik Picheta from Cloudflare. Hood and Gyeongjae maintain Pyodide. Dominik got Python running in Cloudflare Workers in the first place. Your FastAPI app ships as plain Python files. It runs on CPython compiled to WebAssembly, inside V8, at over 350 locations worldwide.
Should your agent call an MCP server or just run a CLI? Pamela Fox is a principal cloud advocate at Microsoft and GitHub. She’s taught MCP workshops from PyCon to WeAreDevelopers. Every week, an agent combs her Gmail, Outlook, and X history to build her news roundup. She uses MCP all day. She’ll still tell you when to skip it. Her colleague pitted the GitHub CLI against the GitHub MCP server on a real bug fix. The CLI used fewer tokens. It succeeded more often. So do we choose CLIs, MCPs, or even just APIs for connecting our agents to our data and services?
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