Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Armin Ronacher — Creator of Flask, Rye, and uv
Personal blog of the Flask creator on Python, tooling, and software design.
lucumr.pocoo.orgMost software that exists today does not forget. Creating software that remembers is easy, but designing software that deliberately "forgets" is a bit more complex.
The personal blog of Armin Ronacher, creator of Flask, Jinja2, and more recently Rye and uv for Python packaging. His posts tackle software philosophy with unusual depth — whether arguing that software should intentionally forget data, questioning async/await orthodoxy, or reflecting on the uncomfortable relationship between open source and money. He writes like someone who's built enough to have earned strong opinions.
Written by Armin Ronacher.
Regular
Publishes weekly or bi-weekly
7
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English
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AI And The Ship of Theseus
Because code gets cheaper and cheaper to write, this includes re-implementations. I mentioned recently that I had an AI port one of my libraries to another language and it ended up choosing a different design for that implementation. In many ways, the functionality was the same, but the path it took to get there was different. The way that port worked was by going via the test suite. Something related, but different, happened with chardet. The current maintainer reimplemented it from scratch...
The Final Bottleneck
Historically, writing code was slower than reviewing code. It might not have felt that way, because code reviews sat in queues until someone got around to picking it up. But if you compare the actual acts themselves, creation was usually the more expensive part. In teams where people both wrote and reviewed code, it never felt like “we should probably program slower.” So when more and more people tell me they no longer know what code is in their own codebase, I feel like something...
A Language For Agents
Last year I first started thinking about what the future of programming languages might look like now that agentic engineering is a growing thing. Initially I felt that the enormous corpus of pre-existing code would cement existing languages in place but now I’m starting to think the opposite is true. Here I want to outline my thinking on why we are going to see more new programming languages and why there is quite a bit of space for interesting innovation. And just in case someone wants...
Pi: The Minimal Agent Within OpenClaw
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you will have noticed this week that a project of my friend Peter went viral on the internet. It went by many names. The most recent one is OpenClaw but in the news you might have encountered it as ClawdBot or MoltBot depending on when you read about it. It is an agent connected to a communication channel of your choice that just runs code. What you might be less familiar with is that what’s under the hood of OpenClaw is a little coding agent...
Colin and Earendil
Regular readers of this blog will know that I started a new company. We have put out just a tiny bit of information today, and some keen folks have discovered and reached out by email with many thoughtful responses. It has been delightful. Colin and I met here, in Vienna. We started sharing coffees, ideas, and lunches, and soon found shared values despite coming from different backgrounds and different parts of the world. We are excited about the future, but we’re equally vigilant of i...
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One of the most thoughtful voices in the Python and Rust ecosystems. If you want to think more carefully about the tools you use and the tradeoffs they make, Armin's writing will challenge you.