#469 Commands, out of the terminal

Topics covered in this episode:

• Command Book App
• uvx.sh: Install Python tools without uv or Python
• Ending 15 years of subprocess polling
• monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI
• Extras
• Joke

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About the show

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Michael #1: Command Book App

• New app from Michael
• Command Book App is a native macOS app for developers, data scientists, AI enthusiasts and more.
• This is a tool I've been using lately to help build Talk Python, Python Bytes, Talk Python Training, and many more applications.
• It's a bit like advanced terminal commands or complex shell aliases, but hosted outside of your terminal. This leaves the terminal there for interactive commands, exploration, short actions.
• Command Book manages commands like "tail this log while I'm developing the app", "Run the dev web server with true auto-reload", and even "Run MongoDB in Docker with exactly the settings I need"
• I'd love it if you gave it a look, shared it with your team, and send me feedback.
• Has a free version and paid version.
• Build with Swift and Swift UI
• Check it out at https://commandbookapp.com

Brian #2: uvx.sh: Install Python tools without uv or Python

• Tim Hopper

Michael #3: Ending 15 years of subprocess polling

• by Giampaolo Rodola
• The standard library's subprocess module has relied on a busy-loop polling approach since the timeout parameter was added to Popen.wait() in Python 3.3, around 15 years ago
• The problem with busy-polling
  • CPU wake-ups: even with exponential backoff (starting at 0.1ms, capping at 40ms), the system constantly wakes up to check process status, wasting CPU cycles and draining batteries.
  • Latency: there's always a gap between when a process actually terminates and when you detect it.
  • Scalability: monitoring many processes simultaneously magnifies all of the above.
  • + L1/L2 CPU cache invalidations
• It’s interesting to note that waiting via poll() (or kqueue()) puts the process into the exact same sleeping state as a plain time.sleep() call. From the kernel's perspective, both are interruptible sleeps.
• Here is the merged PR for this change.

Brian #4: monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

• Samuel Colvin and others at Pydantic
• Still experimental
• “Monty avoids the cost, latency, complexity and general faff of using a full container based sandbox for running LLM generated code. “
• “Instead, it lets you safely run Python code written by an LLM embedded in your agent, with startup times measured in single digit microseconds not hundreds of milliseconds.”

Extras

Brian:

• Expertise is the art of ignoring - Kevin Renskers
  • You don’t need to master the language. You need to master your slice.
  • Learning everything up front is wasted effort.
  • Experience changes what you pay attention to.
• I hate fish - Rands (Michael Lopp)
  • Really about productivity systems
  • And a nice process for dealing with email

Michael:

• Talk Python now has a CLI
• New essay: It's not vibe coding - Agentic engineering
• GitHub is having a day
• Python 3.14.3 and 3.13.12 are available
• Wall Street just lost $285 billion because of 13 markdown files

Joke: Silence, current side project!