#463 2025 is @wrapped

18 snips

Dec 22, 2025

Discover how agentic AI is transforming the software landscape, potentially slashing costs by 90% while speeding up implementation. The discussion delves into the rising demand for software as costs decrease, alongside the risks that open-source sustainability might face. Explore GitHub alternatives amidst pricing controversies and the vital balance between community reach and self-hosting. Plus, enjoy some light-hearted dev hacks that bring humor to coding challenges!

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Agentic AI Cuts Coordination Costs

Agentic AI can collapse implementation and coordination time, radically lowering software shipping costs.
Michael Kennedy and Martin Alderson argue this shifts economics, not eliminates hard product decisions.

INSIGHT

Cheaper Production Can Increase Demand

When production gets cheaper demand often rises instead of spending falling (Jevons paradox).
More efficient software could create far more total software to build and maintain.

ANECDOTE

Agent Helped Security Review Legacy Code

Michael Kennedy used an hour crafting a prompt for a security review and got high-quality results on a legacy code base.
He reported the agent performed well because it had patterns from existing, long-lived code to follow.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Topics covered in this episode:

Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%?
More on Deprecation Warnings
How FOSS Won and Why It Matters
Should I be looking for a GitHub alternative?
Extras
Joke

Watch on YouTube

About the show

Sponsored by us! Support our work through:

Connect with the hosts

Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)
Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social
Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky)

Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.

Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.

HEADS UP: We are taking next week off, happy holiday everyone.

Michael #1: Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%?

by Martin Alderson
Agentic coding tools are collapsing “implementation time,” so the cost curve of shipping software may be shifting sharply
Recent programming advancements haven’t been that great of a true benefit: Cloud, TDD, microservices, complex frontends, Kubernetes, etc.
Agentic AI’s big savings are not just code generation, but coordination overhead reduction (fewer handoffs, fewer meetings, fewer blocks).
Thinking, product clarity, and domain decisions stay hard, while typing and scaffolding get cheap.
Is it the end of software dev? Not really, see Jevons paradox: when production gets cheaper, total demand can rise rather than spending simply falling. (Historically: the efficiency of coal use led to the increased consumption of coal)
Pushes back on “only good for greenfield” by arguing agents also help with legacy code comprehension and bug-fixing. I 100% agree. #Legacy code for the win.

Brian #2: More on Deprecation Warnings

How are people ignoring them?
- yep, it’s right in the Python docs: -W ignore::DeprecationWarning
- Don’t do that!
- Perhaps the docs should give the example of emitting them only once
  - -W once::::DeprecationWarning
See also <code>-X dev</code> mode , which sets -W default and some other runtime checks
Don’t use warn, use the <code>@warnings.deprecated</code> decorator instead
- Thanks John Hagen for pointing this out
- Emits a warning
- It’s understood by type checkers, so editors visually warn you
- You can pass in your own custom UserWarning with category
mypy also has a command line option and setting for this
- --enable-error-code deprecated
- or in [tool.mypy] enable_error_code = ["deprecated"]
My recommendation
- Use @deprecated
- with your own custom warning
- and test with pytest -W error

Michael #3: How FOSS Won and Why It Matters

by Thomas Depierre
Companies are not cheap, companies optimize cost control. They do this by making purchasing slow and painful.
FOSS is/was a major unlock hack to skip procurement, legal, etc.
Example is months to start using a paid “Add to calendar” widget!
It “works both ways”: the same bypass lowers the barrier for maintainers too, no need for a legal entity, lawyers, liability insurance, or sales motion.
Proposals that “fix FOSS” by reintroducing supply-chain style controls (he name-checks SBOMs and mandated processes) risk being rejected or gamed, because they restore the very friction FOSS sidesteps.

Brian #4: Should I be looking for a GitHub alternative?

Pricing changes for GitHub Actions
- The self-hosted runner pricing change caused a kerfuffle.
- It’s has been postponed
But… if you were to look around, maybe pay attention to
- These 4 GitHub alternatives are just as good—or better
  - Codeburg, BitBucket, GitLab, Gitea
- And a new-ish entry, Tangled

Extras

Brian:

End of year sale for The Complete pytest Course
- Use code XMAS2025 for 50% off before Dec 31
Writing work on Lean TDD book on hold for holidays
- Will pick up again in January

Michael:

PyCharm has better Ruff support now out of the box, via Daniel Molnar
- This is from the release notes of 2025.3: "PyCharm 2025.3 expands its LSP integration with support for Ruff, ty, Pyright, and Pyrefly.”
- If you check out the LSP section it will land you on this page and you can go to Ruff.
- The Ruff doc site was also updated. Previously it was only available external tools and a third party plugin, this feels like a big step.
Fun quote I saw on ExTwitter: May your bug tracker be forever empty.

Joke:

Try/Catch/Stack Overflow
Create a super annoying linkedin profile - From Tim Kellogg, submitted by archtoad