Next weekend, I&aposll be heading to Kraków, Poland, for my 25th EuroPython conference.

It&aposs been a long ride since the first EuroPython conference in Charleroi, Belgium, but one I wouldn&apost have wanted to miss.

This year, I&aposll be giving a talk about DuckLake, an extension to DuckDB, one of the most exciting new database systems in the last few years.

Come join in.

Cheers,
Marc-André

08 Jul 2026 3:48pm GMT

Sometimes when I dynamically add widgets to tabs in my PyQt6 application, they pop out as windows instead. What's going on?

If you're dynamically adding widgets to your PyQt6 application and finding that they pop out as separate floating windows instead of appearing neatly inside your application, you're running into one of Qt's gotchas: widget parenting.

This problem usually shows up when widgets are added from a callback, event listener or signal handler. But there are a million different ways to screw this up. Let's look at why this happens and how to fix it.

How Qt decides what's a window

In Qt, every widget can optionally have a parent widget. The parent determines where a widget lives visually - a widget with a parent is drawn inside that parent. A widget without a parent becomes a top-level window, floating independently on your desktop.

This is the root cause of widgets appearing outside your main window. When you create a widget and it doesn't have a parent - either because you didn't set one, or because the parent was lost somehow - Qt treats it as a standalone window.

Three ways to Get a Parent-less Widget

Here are the most common reasons widgets end up floating:

Creating widgets without a parent

# This widget has no parent - it will be a floating window
tabs = QTabWidget()

# This widget has a parent - it will appear inside parent_widget
tabs = QTabWidget(parent_widget)

When you add a widget to a layout, the layout assigns the parent automatically. But if something goes wrong between creation and layout insertion (like an exception, or the widget being shown prematurely), the widget stays parentless.

The safest approach is to pass a parent when creating widgets:

def create_new_tab(self):
    wdg = QWidget()
    layout = QGridLayout(wdg)

    tabs = QTabWidget(wdg)  # Explicitly set parent
    tab1 = QWidget(tabs)     # Explicitly set parent
    tab2 = QWidget(tabs)     # Explicitly set parent
    tabs.addTab(tab1, "Start")
    tabs.addTab(tab2, "Profile")
    layout.addWidget(tabs)

    return wdg

...although, honestly, I don't usually bother. If I know I'll be adding a widget to a layout immediately, I'll omit the parent assignment.

In an window __init__ the safety question is less relevant because, if there is an unhandled exception that blocks the adding your sub-widget to a layout, it will also block the creation of the parent window.

Accidentally recreating a widget

If you have a tab widget stored as self.w and somewhere in your code you do:

self.w = QTabWidget()

...the original tab widget is replaced. If the old widget gets garbage collected, all the tabs that had it as their parent suddenly become orphans - parentless widgets that float as independent windows.

Be careful not to reassign widget attributes unintentionally, especially in callbacks that might run multiple times.

Losing the parent reference

If you explicitly set a widget's parent to None, it becomes a top-level window:

widget.setParent(None)  # This widget is now a floating window

This sometimes happens indirectly. For example, removing a widget from a layout in certain ways can clear its parent.

A clean approach to dynamic tabs

Here's a complete, working example that dynamically adds tabs without any floating-window issues. It demonstrates the correct way to set up a QTabWidget with a "+" button that adds new tabs:

import sys
from PyQt6.QtWidgets import (
    QApplication, QMainWindow, QTabWidget,
    QWidget, QVBoxLayout, QLabel
)


class MainWindow(QMainWindow):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.setWindowTitle("Dynamic Tabs")
        self.setFixedSize(600, 400)

        self.tabs = QTabWidget(self)
        self.tabs.currentChanged.connect(self.on_tab_changed)

        # Add an initial tab
        self.add_content_tab("Tab 1")

        # Add the "+" tab for creating new tabs
        self.tabs.addTab(QWidget(self.tabs), "+")

        self.setCentralWidget(self.tabs)

    def on_tab_changed(self, index):
        # Check if the "+" tab was clicked
        if self.tabs.tabText(index) == "+":
            self.add_new_tab()

    def add_new_tab(self):
        # Count existing content tabs (exclude the "+" tab)
        tab_count = self.tabs.count()  # includes "+"
        new_title = f"Tab {tab_count}"

        # Insert the new tab before the "+" tab
        new_tab = self.create_tab_content(new_title)
        insert_index = self.tabs.count() - 1
        self.tabs.insertTab(insert_index, new_tab, new_title)

        # Switch to the newly created tab (avoid retriggering)
        self.tabs.blockSignals(True)
        self.tabs.setCurrentIndex(insert_index)
        self.tabs.blockSignals(False)

    def add_content_tab(self, title):
        """Add a content tab before the + tab."""
        tab = self.create_tab_content(title)
        # Insert before the last tab if "+" exists, otherwise just add
        plus_index = None
        for i in range(self.tabs.count()):
            if self.tabs.tabText(i) == "+":
                plus_index = i
                break

        if plus_index is not None:
            self.tabs.insertTab(plus_index, tab, title)
        else:
            self.tabs.addTab(tab, title)

    def create_tab_content(self, title):
        """Create the widget content for a tab."""
        widget = QWidget(self.tabs)  # Parent is the tab widget
        layout = QVBoxLayout(widget)
        label = QLabel(f"Content for {title}", widget)
        layout.addWidget(label)
        return widget


app = QApplication(sys.argv)
window = MainWindow()
window.show()
sys.exit(app.exec())

A few things to notice in this example:

• The main window inherits from QMainWindow, and QApplication is created separately.
• Every widget is created with an explicit parent: QWidget(self.tabs), QLabel(text, widget), etc.
• blockSignals(True) is used when programmatically changing the current tab to prevent the currentChanged signal from firing recursively.
• New tabs are inserted before the "+" tab using insertTab, so the "+" always stays at the end.

Summary

Widget parenting is one of those things in Qt that works invisibly when everything is correct - and causes confusing visual glitches the moment something is slightly off. The good news is that once you understand the pattern, the fix is almost always the same: make sure every widget has a parent.

If you're new to PyQt6, our guide to creating your first window covers the basics of setting up a QMainWindow, while the widgets tutorial walks through the most common widgets and how to use them correctly.

For an in-depth guide to building Python GUIs with PyQt6 see my book, Create GUI Applications with Python & Qt6.

08 Jul 2026 6:00am GMT

There have been several security incidents lately that involved compromising GitHub Actions workflows. This has led some to say "GitHub Actions is the weakest link" in publishing and to GitHub publishing a GitHub Actions security roadmap update. But saying it&aposs an issue and acknowledging the fact is one thing, but you still need to do the mitigation work today so you are not going to be the next headline. So this post is going to outline 3 things to do so you can publish to PyPI securely when using GitHub Actions.

But before I go any farther, I want to make 2 things very clear. One is this post is in no way meant to shame anyone into using GitHub Actions. For instance, I have heard people trying to shame maintainers into using GitHub Actions to use Trusted Publishing, and I think that&aposs wrong. Now, if you choose to use a platform that supports Trusted Publishing, then you should definitely use it. But Trusted Publishing is not a reason to change your publishing workflow if the one you have is already secure. In other words, use whatever works best for you to publish securely to PyPI, and if that&aposs GitHub Actions then this blog post is for you.

Two, the title of this post explicitly says "publishing" and not "building and publishing". Doing builds securely is a separate concern that I am not covering. The one piece of advice I will give, though, is one the Python security developer in residence gave me: you should have building and publishing be separate workflows.

With that out of the way, here are 3 steps to securing GitHub Actions for publishing to PyPI that should be relatively painless.

Use zizmor

The zizmor tool examines your GitHub Actions workflows to find things that at dubious when it comes to security. They pretty much all stem from GitHub Actions having insecure defaults in the name of convenience. There are 2 parts to using zizmor:

1. Make it happy
2. Set it up in CI

You can do those two things in whatever order you want but you need to do both to make sure you fix any current issues you have and prevent any new issues from slipping in. Luckily both things are easy to do.

Make zizmor happy

To run zizmor you can do uvx zizmor --quiet --fix .github/ , pipx zizmor --quiet --fix .github/ , or however you choose to run it. That will run zizmor and fix anything that it can in a clean way. Chances are, though, there will be three things to fix by hand.

No permissions by default

By default, the token GitHub Actions gives to your workflow via GITHUB_TOKEN is way too broad, so zizmor flags it. Easiest way to fix this issue is to turn off all permissions at the global level for a workflow and then turn any permissions you need on at the job level. So put the following at the global level of your workflow file (I personally put it just before jobs:):

permissions: {}

If you happen to need some specific permission, you can then specify it per-job so you scope it as tightly as possible. Or if you really need something for everything, you can still set it globally, but you at least you will be explicit about exactly what you want.

The reason you do this is you don&apost want some action to get a hold of your token that can do something as if you&aposre you and do something bad.

No persisted credentials after checkout

When you use the checkout action, GitHub Actions is running Git on your behalf, complete with credentials so the git checkout command works. The problem is those credentials persist passed the checkout action unless you specifically say to not keep them around. So add the following with: clause to your checkout action:

  with:
    persist-credentials: false

You do this so your credentials don&apost leak out to some action that will do something bad with them.

Pin your actions

When you specify an action to use in a workflow, you were probably told to use some Git tag like uses: actions/checkout@v7 which specifies using the v7 tag from the https://github.com/actions/checkout repo. The problem with that is if that action gets compromised, an attacker can just update that tag to point to malicious code and so now you&aposre compromised.

You work around this by pinning your actions to commit hashes. This might sound like a massive hassle, but there are tools that can pin all your actions for you.

• gha-update
• zizmor --fix --gh-token with a (permissionless) token
• Pinact

Those go from simplest to fanciest, but they all get the job done. I personally use gha-update as it&aposs quick and updates my versions along the way. But if you want to keep your current versions as-is then zizmor will do it for you, but you need to give it a token to do the updates (the token is required to avoid being throttled by GitHub). The best thing to do is to use a permissionless token, but if you&aposre being lazy and trust zizmor (and any tool you might be using to run it, e.g. uvx), you can get a token from gh auth token (the following example is for the Fish shell; adjust the syntax for calling gh accordingly for your shell and how you prefer to call zizmor):

zizmor --quiet --fix --gh-token (gh auth token) .github

If you need fancier than any of that, use Pinact.

You also want to require pinning not only for your workflows but any actions that use actions themselves so you&aposre pinned top to bottom. The easiest way to make that a requirement is to run the following command:

gh api "/repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/permissions" --method PUT --field enabled=true --field sha_pinning_required=true

There&aposs also a way to do it via the UI:

Screenshot of turning on required SHA pinning in a repo under Settings - Actions - General

Bonus: Dependabot to keep actions up-to-date

Dependabot will recognize your use of pins, so you can still use it to keep your actions up-to-date (if you so choose; it&aposs okay if you don&apost want to use Dependabot). The one thing I suggest is using a cooldown so you don&apost accidentally pick to a malicious update by adding a cooldown of a week to your dependabot.yml:

- package-ecosystem: github-actions
  directory: /
  schedule:
    interval: monthly
  cooldown:
    default-days: 7

Add zizmor to CI

Conveniently, zizmor has an action you can set up in your repo. Using it will cause any issues found to be reported as a code scanning result under the "Security and quality" tab (which can be turned off).

Screenshot showing the "Code scanning" view under the "Security and quality" tab on GitHub

This means the results are private and thus you don&apost have to worry about exposing anything publicly. You can also use the results as a TODO list if you would find that more motivating to have something to check off instead of getting everything working upfront. As well, if you want to do it gradually this will give you a checklist of things to fix.

You can also run zizmor manually if you want in CI, but I personally just use the zizmor action in a dedicated workflow since the zizmor docs provide such a workflow configuration.

Use Trusted Publishing

If you&aposre going to use GitHub Actions to publish to PyPI, I don&apost see any reason not to use Trusted Publishing. It means you don&apost have to manage any API tokens and you can get attestations. Basically it means you get to outsource your security concerns for how you communicate with PyPI for publishing to GitHub&aposs security team.

The one thing you should make sure to do when setting up Trusted Publishing is set up a GitHub environment. The Trusted Publishing docs strongly encourage it and so do I. You can even have the environment do nothing, but doing it now at least gives you an easy option to use it for something later. But I do suggest you use environments to ...

Require approval to publish

The one specific thing I suggest you do with your GitHub environment is require reviewers to run your publishing workflow. The required reviewer can be yourself! But the key point is to require someone to approve the workflow to run.

You might be wondering what&aposs the point if you trigger the release yourself? It&aposs to add a gate to protect against accidental running of your publishing workflow. The accident could be from you or it could be from a malicious actor who has managed to trigger the workflow. By requiring your approval, neither scenario can happen without you clicking that approval button while logged into your GitHub account. And that means someone would need to hack your GitHub account to work around it (and as mentioned above, that means you get to lean on the GitHub security team from preventing that from happening).

Out of everything I have listed, this is probably the most arduous as it&aposs a cost every time you want to do a release. But it&aposs one approval and you&aposre probably already going to be doing something to trigger the release, so you&aposre already online.

And that&aposs it! Those 3 steps get you a long way towards publishing securely from GitHub Actions to PyPI.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Seth Larson for providing feedback on a draft of this post and giving advice on Mastodon when I posted about these steps. Thanks to William Woodruff for creating zizmor and also giving advice on Mastodon. And thanks to everyone who participated constructively in the discussion on Mastodon.

07 Jul 2026 8:44pm GMT

03 Jul 2026 3:00pm GMT

import typer

app = typer.Typer()


@app.command()
def hello(name: str):
    print(f"Hello {name}")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app()

02 Jul 2026 4:00am GMT

Weeknotes (2026 week 27)

The last entry in this series was published 10 weeks ago so it really is time for another review of the releases I did during this time.

Releases

feincms3-forms

The feincms3-forms forms builder has gained a documentation page on the wonderful Read the Docs service. The 0.6.1 release doesn't contain any code changes, just pyproject.toml updates and the mentioned documentation rework.

django-imagefield

django-imagefield 0.23 is still in alpha. The handling of image fields when using libvips is optimized to use less memory hopefully. We'll see. I also added some tests to verify that .mpo files are handled properly.

feincms3

The Vimeo embed now always sets the dnt=1 parameter on the <iframe>, which asks Vimeo to not track the user.

django-mptt

I wrote about the somewhat annoying maintenance again. The library is still officially unmaintained, but I did a lot of work either just closing issues or also fixing them. The docs also contain many clarifications. I only released 0.19rc1 for now.

feincms3-sites and feincms3-language-sites

Last time I mentioned that default HTTP/S ports are now stripped so that the host matching can determine the correct site. Now a new case appeared where trailing dots weren't stripped. The normalization of hosts has been extended. I'm sure we're still missing some exotic cases where we should do more normalization, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

django-prose-editor and django-js-asset

Various upgrades to the editor and especially the importmaps rework in both packages - the importmap infrastructure should now be CSP-compatible! I wrote more about that in the last post The 2026 way of using importmaps in Django.

django-content-editor

Minor bugfixes and a major version bump because of the rework of the JavaScript code into multiple ES modules. The content editor now uses importmaps as well.

django-fhadmin

Small bugfix so that links aren't underlined in the app groups list when they shouldn't be, matching how the Django admin itself behaves.

django-cabinet

The cabinet / prose editor integration for the file (or image) picker is final and released as a stable version.

django-json-schema-editor

This small release only contains more correct German translations of strings.

Honorable mention: django-debug-toolbar

I didn't actually create this release, but I contributed various changes to it. The changelog for 7.0 is here.

01 Jul 2026 5:00pm GMT

As I have discussed in previous posts, "AIs" can make mistakes. In fact, they do make mistakes, and their mistake-making patterns are such that where and how they will make mistakes is both uncertain and constantly changing.

Thus, in any scenario where you want to attempt to make "productive" use of "AI", you must have a system in place for checking every result. Not checking some results; checking every result. If each result might have a consequence for you (and if it didn't have a consequence, why bother automating it?) and you cannot predict in advance which kinds of results will need verification, then verification is always required.

The verification often ends up being just as expensive as doing the work in the first place, which means that if you want your usage of "AI" to be personally profitable, you have to find someone else to externalize the cost of verification onto. This person becomes your adversary, and, if you are successful, your "AI's" victim.

The Ladder-Climber And Their Reverse-Centaur Rungs

One way that this constellation of facts can straightforwardly assemble themselves into a dystopian nightmare is the phenomenon, described by Cory Doctorow, of the reverse centaur. This is when your employer non-consensually turns you into the verification system. The "AI" does the fun part of initially performing the work, and then you do the boring part where you check if the robot is right and clean up its messes, even if everyone already knows that it would, in aggregate, be cheaper for you to do the work in the first place.

Reverse centaurs can be made from any automation, not only "AI" automation. I think that there is a reason that this term happens to have emerged in the "age of AI", though, and not with earlier automation technologies (even those which were considerably more viscerally horrific). That reason is: the wrongness of "AI" output is not merely a technical feature that must be compensated for, it is a generalized externality.

As I mentioned above, if you are responsible for the entirety of the work, both extruding the "AI" output and checking it, it's usually cheaper to have humans do the entirety of the work to begin with. When humans do the writing directly, we can check as we go, and thus verification doesn't need to be as comprehensive.

When "AI" coding advocates say "code review is the bottleneck", what they are observing is that the LLM is still rolling the dice for each PR, and a human is still necessary to verify that each of those rolls is a winner. But calling this process "code review" is a bit of a misnomer; it's not really "code review" in the traditional sense, it's human understanding.

Before the advent of "AI", the human understanding was implicit in the process of writing the code in the first place¹, and the code review was a way of diffusing and extending that understanding. Now that the code can be authored with no initial understanding taking place, that cost has not gone away, it has moved.

Human understanding was always the bottleneck.

However, this is taking a collaborative view of a software project, where satisfying the needs and solving the problems of your customers are the goals. We can see that "AI" is a bad tool to satisfy those goals, because all it's doing is converting the first half of the work, that of understanding the code as you write it, to understanding the agent's output as you read it.

What if, instead, we were to take the view that every software company is a Hobbesian nightmare, red in tooth and claw? In this view, the only goal of a software project is for the individual developers to make their promo cycles and get their bonuses. Given that there is only a certain amount of money to go around, this is a zero-sum game where each programmer wants to look more productive than their colleagues.

Pretty much every organization finds it easy to reward "productivity" as expressed by lines of code emitted, but the benefits of doing thorough and thoughtful design, analysis, and code review very difficult to reward. In this world, an LLM is an invaluable tool for the sociopathic ladder-climber, particularly if your legacy organization is still structuring their workflows as if the person prompting the bot is "writing" the code, and then they get to foist off the act of "reviewing" the code onto someone else.

Here, the prompter effectively externalizes the cost of the LLM's failures but internalizes any benefits. The prompter will vibe-code a big feature, so large that the assigned reviewer can't possibly comprehend it all effectively. When this happens, the reviewer will, eventually, be pressured to approve it, even if they can try to spot a few problems along the way. The reviewer has their own work to get back to, after all, the obligation to review the prompter's (read: the bot's) code is a drain on their time that they are not going to get rewarded for.

If this feature is a big success, the prompter gets a promotion. If it causes a big issue, well, the reviewer must not have been careful enough.

This is why LLMs are "good for coding", and also why their biggest promoters keep having outages.

The Generative Gish Galloper

Coding is the biggest "success story" of this type of adversarial communication, but it is by far not the only instance of such a thing. LLMs create a new form of leverage that can turn Brandolini's law from a linear advantage into an exponential one. If you are engaged in a political debate where you want to overwhelm the other side in nonsense, an LLM can generate bullshit faster than it is physically possible for a human being to type, let alone respond thoughtfully. There is an asymmetry to the utility of this weapon as well: only one side of the political spectrum wants to flood the zone and destroy trust in institutions and the concept of truth. There's a good reason that the fascists love it.

Straightforward Spam and Fraud

This is kind of obvious, but LLMs can generate lightly-customized, plausible-looking text much more quickly than any human being. This facilitates their use in fraud, spam, and scams. In a spamming or fraudulent interaction, once again, the costs are externalized onto the victim: the recipient of a spam message has to do all the work of "checking" the LLM's output. Spammers already expect very low hit rates from boilerplate, and if the LLM can increase those percentages from 1% to 5% the technology will pay for itself; they don't need anything like reliable accuracy.

Customer "Support"

If you have any kind of commercial relationship with a company, I probably don't even need to mention this: customer "support" bots are a misery. Everybody knows it at this point. But customer support is usually conceptualized by businesses as an adversarial interaction, because it is a cost center. They maintain internal metrics on time-to-resolution and try to optimize them. Implicitly, this creates a dynamic where the goal of the customer service agent's job is not to solve your problem, but to emit noise that will cause you to think your problem is resolved, or to give up, as fast as possible. Unsurprisingly, LLMs can emit this noise faster than humans can, getting those customers off the phone. But those customers will remember those interactions, and the story outside the TTR metrics is horrible.

Similarly to the situation in software development, LLMs can look very good on paper for customer support, but mostly what they are doing is illuminating the problems with the industry's existing metrics, by turning "winning the metrics battle against the customer" into a more obvious and immediate defeat for the company's long term reputation.

"Education"

In 2026 it is sadly a fact of life that students cheat all the time using "AI", and that this cheating is very successful, in that the teachers find it very hard to detect.

LLMs are great for cheating on schoolwork because the student is externalizing the work of the checking onto the teachers, who are often starting at a disadvantage to begin with, at least in the US.

My view is that this is happening because of a divergence in the way that students vs. teachers (or, more accurately, "the broader educational system") view grading.

When a student is asked to write an essay, the teachers see the effort as both intrinsically worthwhile for the student, as well as useful as a pedagogical tool to evaluate and react to the student's progress. The student, by contrast, sees a stumbling block designed to knock them off the path to success and into a permanent underclass. It is no wonder that the student sees "AI" as useful to their own goals and has no compunction about deploying it.

There is a bitter irony that the ability to understand the inherent value of actually writing the essay on their own is the sort of thing that students can really only learn by writing a bunch of essays. There's no way that I can think of which makes the benefit legible as long as a shortcut is available.

The net effect here is a downward spiral, where the already-wobbling educational system is sustaining an attack that it doesn't have the resources to recover from. The individual students' attacks against their teachers and their schools' grading systems might appear to momentarily succeed, but they will win the battle and lose the war.

Spamming "For Good"?

Usually when we talk about someone unilaterally choosing to enter into an adversarial relationship, that's an "attack" and for good reasons we have a negative impression of the attacker. However, I would be remiss if I did not point out that there are some cases where the relationship was already adversarial; just because you're the attacker doesn't mean that you are evil.

For example we might imagine use-cases like automatically filing appeals for prior authorizations against health insurance. It's relatively well-known at this point that the main way for-profit insurers maintain their margins is by denying claims right up to the line of the policies themselves being fraud, so using a spamming tool to fight them might be entirely justifiable² in that case.

Similarly, using an LLM could be justified in a fight against a company refusing to honor a warranty. One could imagine using an LLM to immediately generate replies and escalations.

However, even in imagined cases like these, the underlying problem is that the insurers and the vendors already have a tremendous amount of structural power, so it is more likely that they will have the advantage in deploying a communications weapon like an LLM, as well as enacting policies to simply ignore any LLM-based communication that you might submit. Worse, if these strategies were to become widespread, they might provide an excuse to reject any communications by feeding them into an unreliable "LLM detector" and issuing an automated "computer says no" even to hand-written correspondence.

It is also worth stressing that these cases are imagined, as compared to the very real coworker-abuse, spam, scam, fraud, and disinformation campaigns being waged in real life today.

Therefore, while legitimate uses might exist, it's hard to imagine that there's anywhere they would be genuinely valuable and sustainable. In the best case "AI" will provide a temporary advantage for underdogs that will provoke an arms race which the resource-advantaged adversaries will win in the long run, in the worst case the arms race itself will cement permanent structural change that will make things worse.

"Search" By Stealing

Most of the adversarial utility of "AI" is on the "write" side, since write-amplification is more obviously aggressive than reading. But the "read" side of LLMs - summarization and question-answering - can be a form of attack as well.

To begin with, the act of reading itself is currently enormously destructive, but that's arguably not a fundamental aspect of this technology. They could set reasonable rate-limits and respect things like robots.txt, as search engines have for decades now. They could also refrain from committing criminal levels of copyright infringement. But, today, using "AI" tools does suborn this sort of out-of-control crawling.

More insidiously, consider the scenario described in this YouTube video. The LTT Bros decided to try Linux again, and in the course of so doing, they had problems. When trying to solve these problems, they were faced with a choice: they could consult Reddit, or they could ask an LLM. Asking an LLM would "gaslight the heck out of" them, but they still found it preferable, because they would at least get an answer without getting yelled at.

Initially this sounds great. But it also means that you want to extract knowledge from a community, while mechanically eliding any values or norms that the community may want to impart as part of offering that knowledge. As someone who spent many years in a community tech support role, this is worrying. Many requests for support are people asking how to do things that will momentarily solve a superficial problem but create a long-term reliability problem or even an immediate security risk, that the question-asker doesn't want to hear about. Consider the question "I'm tired of entering my password so much, how do I make it so my laptop unlocks automatically". An obsequious chatbot will helpfully tell you how to do this without pushback.

But, this is also a sort of ethically murky area. The Linux community is somewhat famously, for many years now, a toxic cesspool of general hostility, misogyny, etc. It is certainly a good thing that people can get access to this knowledge without subjecting themselves to abuse. But it also means that the people with the power and the privilege to change the community for the better can just quietly withdraw, rather than fixing the problems. It also means that the positive elements of culture cannot be transmitted, and people will have no opportunity to learn about unknown unknowns.

In this case, the "adversarial" communication is with society. The thing that using an LLM for search lets you do is withdraw from society and avoid forming any personal connections. There are some personal connections which are painful and annoying, and so that can feel like a momentary balm. But the need to make connections in general is, like, the concept of society itself.

Who Am I Hurting?

LLMs are good at adversarial communication. They are so good at it, relative to their other benefits, that they will tend to make communications adversarial if you are not remaining vigilant about the possibility that it might do so. My request to you, dear reader, if you are going to use such tools, is to always ask yourself, "who might I be hurting, if I use an LLM for this?"

If you're using an "AI", who is its adversary? If you haven't given it one yet, who might the "AI" turn into an adversary? Who might you overwhelm with an asymmetric amount of output, or, if you're receiving information and not sending it, who are you taking that information from without consulting?

Figure out the answers to these questions and conduct yourself accordingly; the answer might be "yourself".

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my patrons who are supporting my writing on this blog. If you like what you've read here and you'd like to read more of it, or you'd like to support my various open-source endeavors, you can support my work as a sponsor!

23 Jun 2026 8:06pm GMT

Codecov's unreliability breaking CI on my open source projects has been a constant source of frustration for me for years. I have found a way to enforce coverage over a whole GitHub Actions build matrix that doesn't rely on third-party services.

09 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Let's say you're writing a Python library.

In this library, you have some collection of state that represents "options" or "configuration" for a bunch of operations. Such a set of options is a bundle of potentially ever-increasing complexity. Thus, you will want it to have an extremely minimal compatibility surface, with a very carefully chosen public interface, that is either small, or perhaps nothing at all. Such an object conveys state and might have some private behavior, but all you want consumers to be able to do is build it in very constrained, specific ways, and then pass it along as a parameter to your own APIs.

By way of example, imagine that you're wrapping a library that handles shipping physical packages.

There are a zillion ways to do it ship a package. There are different carriers who can ship it for you. There's air freight, and ground freight, and sea freight. There's overnight shipping. There's the option to require a signature. There's package tracking and certified mail. Suffice it to say, lots of stuff.

If you are starting out to implement such a library, you might need an object called something like ShippingOptions that encapsulates some of this. At the core of your library you might have a function like this:

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async def shipPackage(
        how: ShippingOptions,
        where: Address,
    ) -> ShippingStatus:
    ...

If you are starting out implementing such a library, you know that you're going to get the initial implementation of ShippingOptions wrong; or, at the very least, if not "wrong", then "incomplete". You should not want to commit to an expansive public API with a ton of different attributes until you really understand the problem domain pretty well.

Yet, ShippingOptions is absolutely vital to the rest of your library. You'll need to construct it and pass it to various methods like estimateShippingCost and shipPackage. So you're not going to want a ton of complexity and churn as you evolve it to be more complex.

Worse yet, this object has to hold a ton of state. It's got attributes, maybe even quite complex internal attributes that relate to different shipping services.

Right now, today, you need to add something so you can have "no rush", "standard" and "expedited" options. You can't just put off implementing that indefinitely until you can come up with the perfect shape. What to do?

The tool you want here is the opaque data type design pattern. C is lousy with such things (FILE, pthread_*_t, fd_set, etc). A typedef in a header file can easily achieve this.

But in Python, if you expose a dataclass - or any class, really - even if you keep all your fields private, the constructor is still, inherently, public. You can make it raise an exception or something, but your type checker still won't help your users; it'll still look like it's a normal class.

Luckily, Python typing provides a tool for this: typing.NewType.

Let's review our requirements:

1. We need a type that our client code can use in its type annotations; it needs to be public.
2. They need to be able to consruct it somehow, even if they shouldn't be able to see its attributes or its internal constructor arguments.
3. To express high-level things (like "ship fast") that should stay supported as we add more nuanced and complex configurations in the future (like "ship with the fastest possible option provided by the lowest-cost carrier that supports signature verification").

In order to solve these problems respectively, we will use:

1. a public NewType, which gives us our public name...
2. which wraps a private class with entirely private attributes, to give us an actual data structure, while not exposing the constructor,
3. a set of public constructor functions, which returns our NewType.

When we put that all together, it looks like this:

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from dataclasses import dataclass
from typing import Literal, NewType

@dataclass
class _RealShipOpts:
    _speed: Literal["fast", "normal", "slow"]

ShippingOptions = NewType("ShippingOptions", _RealShipOpts)

def shipFast() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts("fast"))

def shipNormal() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts("normal"))

def shipSlow() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts("slow"))

As a snapshot in time, this is not all that interesting; we could have just exposed _RealShipOpts as a public class and saved ourselves some time. The fact that this exposes a constructor that takes a string is not a big deal for the present moment. For an initial quick and dirty implementation, we can just do checks like if options._speed == "fast" in our shipping and estimation code.

However, the main thing we are doing here is preserving our flexibility to evolve the related APIs into the future, so let's see how we might do that. For example, let's allow the shipping options to contain a concrete and specific carrier and freight method:

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from dataclasses import dataclass
from enum import Enum, auto
from typing import NewType

class Carrier(Enum):
    FedEx = auto()
    USPS = auto()
    DHL = auto()
    UPS = auto()

class Conveyance(Enum):
    air = auto()
    truck = auto()
    train = auto()

@dataclass
class _RealShipOpts:
    _carrier: Carrier
    _freight: Conveyance

ShippingOptions = NewType("ShippingOptions", _RealShipOpts)

def shipFast() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts(Carrier.FedEx, Conveyance.air))

def shipNormal() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts(Carrier.UPS, Conveyance.truck))

def shipSlow() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts(Carrier.USPS, Conveyance.train))

def shippingDetailed(
    carrier: Carrier, conveyance: Conveyance
) -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts(carrier, conveyance))

As a NewType, our public ShippingOptions type doesn't have a constructor. Since _RealShipOpts is private, and all its attributes are private, we can completely remove the old versions.

Anything within our shipping library can still access the private variables on ShippingOptions; as a NewType, it's the same type as its base at runtime, so it presents minimal¹ overhead.

Clients outside our shipping library can still call all of our public constructors: shipFast, shipNormal, and shipSlow all still work with the same (as far as calling code knows) signature and behavior.

If you need to build and convey some state within your public API, while avoiding breakages associated with compatibility churn, hopefully this technique can help you do that!

Acknowledgments

Thanks for reading, and thank you to my patrons who are supporting my writing on this blog. If you like what you've read here and you'd like to read more of it, or you'd like to support my various open-source endeavors, you can support my work as a sponsor.

22 May 2026 12:33am GMT