The DSF Board hosts open office hours every Wednesday at 6:00 PM UTC (check your local time). Anyone in the Django community is welcome to drop in. You do not need an agenda or an invitation. Video call details are on the DSF Office Hours page.

We have been running these since October 2024, and right now we have two things we would especially like to talk with you about.

Who shows up

On any given Wednesday, you might find DSF Board members, Steering Council members, Django Fellows, working group members, and community members who are curious about joining a working group. There is no membership requirement. Anybody from the community can join, and often does.

The Executive Director search

We recently published a call for applicants for a Django Executive Director. If you are considering applying, or you are still deciding whether it is the right fit, come to office hours and ask us anything: what the job actually looks like, what we expect in the first year, how the search works. We would rather answer your questions directly than have you guess from a job posting.

If this is the first you are hearing about the search, please help us spread the word. The best candidate may be someone who has not thought to look.

Fundraising to support it

Hiring an Executive Director is why we raised our 2026 fundraising goal from $300,000 to $500,000, which needs about $16,000 per month in additional recurring support. We have made real progress and are working to close the rest.

If your company uses Django, you can help through corporate sponsorship, a direct donation, or GitHub Sponsors. Most of these are a small lift for a company that already depends on Django. If you want fundraising materials to bring to your leadership team, or help picking the option that fits, come to office hours, and we will get you what you need.

Everything else

Office hours cover plenty beyond that: what our working groups are up to and how to join one, projects the Foundation is working on, and whatever you have been wondering about how the DSF operates. In the weeks before a board meeting, we use the time to gather feedback on what we are about to discuss. If you want the board to hear something, this is a direct line.

One thing office hours are not: a general Django support channel. It is not the place to debug your code or market a product. For coding help, the Django Forum will get you faster answers.

Office hours are the most direct way to keep up with the Foundation, but they are not the only one. We wrote up all the other places we post and where the conversation happens if Wednesdays do not work for you.

Otherwise, put a Wednesday on your calendar and say hello.

12 Aug 2026 5:25pm GMT

Weeknotes (2026 week 33)

Holidays and the heat wave

I had four weeks of holidays this summer. The timing couldn't have been much better with the heat wave - doing much thinking seems to be impossible anyway. I organized a multi-day feast with a few friends and with much help from others. We built up the site and installations over the course of multiple days and spent some days tearing most of it down afterwards. I started back to the office job physically tired but mentally rested. That's good. I'm really looking forward to seeing the pictures people took.

What's less good is that we're living through the projections which climate scientists warned us about decades ago. Or worse, even, since Switzerland is one of the regions where the temperature increased more than the global average. The member of Switzerland's Federal Council heading the Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications reportedly said that he didn't expect such intense heat. Of course, it was reported earlier in the same week that the same member was responsible for removing funding for a more resilient forest from the budget for the next fiscal year. This is unfortunately to be expected: he has long been connected to the fossil energy industry. After all, he was also the president of Swissoil and Auto Schweiz. It's really frustrating. None of this is news to climate scientists, and it hasn't been news here either - these posts start in 2005, back when I was studying environmental sciences at ETH with a focus on atmospheric physics.

Scripts for auto-merging dependabot and pre-commit pull requests

I let Claude write some scripts for automatically merging pull requests created by various bots, see here. The script finds pull requests created by a predefined list of bots in a defined list of accounts (organizations or users) and squash-merges them if the CI run is green and there are no conflicts. It's a dry run by default; --apply is required to actually merge anything. It doesn't look at reviews and doesn't care whether a bump is major or minor - I'm relying on the test suites for that.

The ruff 0.16 update was a bit painful because ruff now enables 413 rules by default, up from 59. Recurring themes were warnings about mutable class variables (which are common when using Django), blind except clauses and underspecified dates without time zones, but none of them in scenarios where they actually hurt.

So, instead of just running the merge script, I had to fix up dozens of pyproject.toml files and projects. Oh well, next time will be smooth again.

Releases

Since I've been away from the computer for so long, the list of releases from the start of July onwards is quite short.

django-authlib

django-authlib 0.18 now also supports Microsoft Entra ID logins. The admin integration also has support for Microsoft accounts, not just for Google.

django-content-editor

The django-content-editor 9.0.1 just contains a small fix which avoids submitting the form that allows cloning content between regions when cancelling the dialog.

12 Aug 2026 5:00pm GMT

This PyCharm release is a big one for anyone building with AI. Your agents can now roll up their sleeves inside your Jupyter notebooks - working against a live kernel instead of firing off disconnected scripts. And they finally know which Python to use, so packages land in the right environment every time.

We're also welcoming marimo notebooks into the IDE and introducing changes to bundled plugins to keep PyCharm fast and focused.

Release highlights

Jupyter notebook skill for AI agents

Let AI agents such as Claude Code and Codex create, edit, and run .ipynb notebooks via PyCharm's notebook model and a live kernel, so variables, models, and data persist across cells instead of disappearing when the agent shells out. For you, this means more reliable notebook and ML work - with fewer tokens used. To start, just open the AI chat and ask the agent to work in your notebook.

This functionality is available with a JetBrains AI subscription.

Agent environment coordinator

Tired of AI agents installing packages into the wrong Python environment? This new skill gives the agent your project's configured interpreter and tool - uv, Poetry, pip in a venv, or conda - so commands target the right environment, not a system one. If none exists, it can set one up via PyCharm, and the agent decides how to use the information. To start, ask the agent to run or install something in your project.

This functionality is available with a JetBrains AI subscription.

marimo notebooks in PyCharm [third-party plugin]

You can now open, edit, and run marimo notebooks directly in PyCharm with the new plugin developed by the marimo team.

Work with reactive cells and interactive UI elements in a dedicated notebook without leaving your IDE. Because marimo notebooks are stored as Python files, they are Git-friendly, executable as scripts, and easy to integrate into your existing Python projects.

Changes to bundled plugins in 2026.2

As part of ongoing maintenance, we are unbundling and deprecating low-usage plugins, including Data Wrangler, Hugging Face, and Google Colab support. You can continue to install compatible versions from JetBrains Marketplace, but these plugins are no longer bundled or actively maintained by the PyCharm team. A more focused set of bundled plugins means a leaner codebase, helping us keep PyCharm fast and responsive and invest our effort where it has the most impact.

Redesigned Python Packages tool window

• Packages now appear in a collapsible tree alongside their dependencies so you can see what's installed and why - with new icons, right-aligned versions, and inline Install/Update links.
• A new floating search popup (think "Search Everywhere" but for packages) makes finding and installing fast. It also shows you which environment will be used and lets you pick a module and dependency group.
• You can install a package into specific uv/Poetry dependency groups like dev or test per workspace member, change versions inline or through the new Change Version dialog, and install from VCS via Custom Installation.
• Package repositories can be enabled or disabled, with state remembered across sessions. In addition, unreachable URLs show a clear error, and Remote Development support is substantially improved.

Clearer type checking

Get clearer, more actionable type messages:

• Richer type-mismatch errors, now with a breakdown of why the types don't match.
• A type diff for callables and other composite types, so both sides read the same way.
• Fully rendered names and types in inspection tooltips, with clickable links.

Bug fixes

• Virtual environments for end-of-life Python: PyCharm no longer creates venvs for Python 2.7, 3.6, and 3.7. You can still create a new env from a command line and add it to the IDE manually.
• SQLAlchemy 2.0 Session.get() inference: Session.get(Entity, id) (and SQLModel) is now inferred as a model instance rather than the class.

Download PyCharm

All of these updates are available in PyCharm 2026.2.1. Update right from the IDE or the Toolbox App, or download the latest version to try everything out on your own projects. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback.

12 Aug 2026 12:05pm GMT

AI agents are supposed to save you time. Ask one to install a dependency or run your project, though, and it often does the opposite: It installs into the wrong Python, ignores the uv or virtual environment your project uses, and hands back a broken setup for you to fix yourself.

PyCharm's new Agent Environment Coordinator skill fixes this, and this blog post shows just how helpful it proves to be.

AGENT ENVIRONMENT COORDINATOR The agent stopped guessing Python. Average task success 68% -> 98% Baseline With skill 28 Python tasks 6 AI models No system Python pollution

We tested six AI models using 28 different Python programming tasks. Without access to the project's real environment, they solved 68% of the tasks on average. After we gave them access, their average success rate shot up to 98% - and they didn't even modify the system Python.

If you're currently using AI agents in your Python projects, read on to see how the Agent Environment Coordinator can improve their performance.

When the agent could see the project's environment, it stopped failing

When using the Agent Environment Coordinator skill, each agent, regardless of the model, was able to complete far more of the 28 tasks. (See the Methodology section below for details on what the tasks entailed.) Here is the share of successfully completed tasks for each model, comparing the baseline to running with the skill in PyCharm:

MODEL BASELINE WITH SKILL Claude Sonnet 4.6 36% 96% Claude Sonnet 5 73% 100% Claude Opus 4.8 67% 100% Claude Opus 5.0 94% 98% Codex / GPT-5.5 62% 95% Codex / GPT-5.6 80% 100%

Every model improved, with the weakest baseline improving the most.

Why we built this

LLMs almost never use a project's dedicated virtual environment. They fall back to a system interpreter, ignoring the fact that there may be several system interpreters and real projects often have more complex, multi-interpreter setups already configured in PyCharm that the agent has no way to see.

For example, pip install httpx runs against the wrong Python, the package installs globally, the script fails, and the environment is polluted.

PyCharm already knows which interpreter belongs to your project and which tool manages it. The agent just couldn't ask - so we gave it a way.

How it works

The Agent Environment Coordinator lets the agent ask PyCharm two things. get_python_environment returns the correct interpreter for the file or module in question - the path plus the tool behind it (uv, Poetry, pip + venv, conda). If no environment exists yet, configure_python_interpreter sets one up by reusing PyCharm's existing configuration mechanism - the same one that offers to create a .venv - so the new interpreter also becomes visible in the IDE.

The important part is what the skill doesn't do. It returns information; it never intercepts or rewrites the command. The agent asks which Python to use, gets an accurate answer, and decides whether and how to use it to write the command itself. We hand it the missing context using existing mechanisms in PyCharm - we don't let it take the wheel.

The payoff is practical: The agent works with your project setup out of the box. You don't need to coach it through prompts about which environment to use, or clean up wrong installs afterward.

This PyCharm functionality is available with a JetBrains AI subscription.

Methodology

We built a dataset of 28 tasks covering everyday Python-environment work, like running tests, installing a library, listing dependencies, resolving a version conflict, and so forth.

Each task ultimately required the agent to pick the correct interpreter to execute a command. The eval also reduced the reward when the agent polluted the system environment, so a high score reflects a clean run, not just a passing one.

We ran the full set three times per model, with and without the skill, using Harbor, and averaged the results.

Results

Success rates climbed across the board - Sonnet 5 improved from 73% to 100%, Opus 5 from 94% to 100%, and Codex/GPT-5.6 from 80% to 100%.

Two things stand out in addition to this numerical jump:

• The improved success rates demonstrate that the models lacked context, rather than being incapable of completing the tasks. The models didn't get better - they just stopped guessing the interpreter, which is why the weakest baseline improved the most.
• Because the eval docks points for polluting the system environment, these higher scores also imply cleaner runs. The agents didn't just pass more often; they stopped leaving a mess behind.

Want to try it?

Open the AI chat in PyCharm 2026.2.1 and ask your agent to install a package or run something in your project - it'll reach for the right interpreter on its own.

The Agent Environment Coordinator is one of PyCharm's bundled skills. You can browse and manage all of them right in the IDE, expand the built-in library with external registries like public GitHub repositories, or import skills you've already set up for Claude Code or Codex.

12 Aug 2026 12:01pm GMT

This tutorial shows how to configure Django to load and serve up static and media files, public and private, via Cloudflare R2.

12 Aug 2026 3:28am GMT

In 1983, Tom Duff needed to copy memory into an output register faster than his compiler could manage, and wrote the most famous abuse of switch in the history of C. I ported his device to JavaScript and raced it against the plainest possible loop - and the verdict changed with the engine, the engine's version, and the CPU underneath.

11 Aug 2026 10:00am GMT

Starting with 0.3.0, Astral's uv brought many great features, including support for cross-platform lock files uv.lock. Together with subsequent fixes, it has become Python's finest workflow tool for my (non-scientific) use cases. Here's how I build production-ready containers, as fast as possible.

06 Aug 2026 12:00am 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