From Python Core to Personal Apps: Working with AI Agents

How is agentic engineering affecting work on core CPython these days?

Yeah, it's been a long...

There's been changes in how we see operations like contributions, like AI-assisted contributions.

And honestly, as the maintainers ourselves, we use AI.

We use Gen AI.

And I know, like, maybe not all of us.

There are, not just myself, there are other core developers who Just use AI to write code like they don't write code by hand anymore.

It's just prompting and, you know, use agentic workflows.

But we also see, we also receive contributions from people.

And mostly what we see is that the contributions from people weren't up to standard like they they don't review they don't adjust AI output before creating PRs and that is that's frustrating to us like if they if the user doesn't first sanitize or review or make sure it sounds like human it's I say it's like We really rather engage with real human than with AI.

And I know this contradicts what I said earlier, where we actually use AI to contribute.

The difference is that as the experience maintainer, we know what the project needs we have additional expertise knowing like what is actually good good commit messages or good PR body good code or good practices in how to adjust unit tests and everything like that What we see, the problem is that first time contributors or new contributors, they just wanted to have something in CPython.

And they just made random things that nobody asked, nobody discussed.

And that is the part that is draining us.

Like, it's not that we say, no, don't use AI at all.

But bring yourself to it.

And I think people are missing the point of contributing to open source.

For me, like the whole process of contributing open source to open source, like learning how to communicate with people in the open, learning to ask questions, clarify, you know, the issues, the requirements.

Learning how to actually write code or how to use Git, those are part, those are the real point of contributing to open source, getting the experience.

And when you delegate all of that to agents without actually learning...

That's really missing the point of it.

And so right now I see chatters even within core team members.

There are people who said, I don't want to see this kind of AI slope at all.

I don't use it.

There are people like me who actually use it.