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Posted by networked 1 day ago

Warn about PyPy being unmaintained(github.com)
185 points | 67 commentspage 2
anonnon 20 hours ago|
Odd how you still see announcements of this nature if Anthropic's marketing is be believed.
jorvi 18 hours ago||
Yup.

For me the biggest signifier is Spotify. They claim their (best) devs don't even code anymore, they use an internal AI tool that they just send prompts to which then checks out a personal test build that they can download off of Slack. "A new feature in 10 minutes!"

Okay, if that is the case, why have we only seen like 3-4 minor new QoL improvements in Spotify the last ~12 months, with no new grand features? And why haven't they fired 95% of their devs and let the remaining elite go buckwild with Claude?

The Emperor really has no clothes.

stavros 16 hours ago|||
Everyone here says "if developers are so much faster, why aren't we seeing more features?!" as if the only thing required to release a feature is developers.

My CEO keeps asking me "how can we go faster with AI", and my answer is "we can't, because even if we had developers that would instantly develop any feature perfectly, we'd still be bottlenecked on how slow we are at deciding what to actually release".

crote 14 hours ago||||
> why have we only seen like 3-4 minor new QoL improvements

You are seeing improvements? From what I can tell, my user experience has only been going downhill over the past years - even pre-AI...

SCdF 16 hours ago||||
tbf they have been saying they've started doing this since December, so we're only a few months in. And like most software it's an iceberg: 99% of work on not observable by users, and in spotify's case listeners are only one of presumably dozens of different users. For all we know they are shipping massive improvements to eg billing
brodo 16 hours ago||||
Also, why isn‘t there a native client for all platforms? Could they not just let the AI auto-translate the code?
wiseowise 10 hours ago||
Because believe it or not, majority of users couldn't care less whether it is native or not. I don’t even see Spotify, it’s just something that lives in the background and plays music.
re-thc 17 hours ago|||
> They claim their (best) devs don't even code anymore

No, they claimed they didn’t code during a time period. Around year end until early this year. Technically they could have just been on leave.

Also best dev = principal / staff engineers. They rarely code anyway.

AI or no AI anyone could have made that claim.

QQ00 19 hours ago|||
Anthropic released vibe coded C compiler that doesn't work, how their LLM can help in maintaining PyPy?
networked 17 hours ago|||
Strange subthread. I don't see Claude Opus 4.6 changing the tide for PyPy. There is no need to understate AI capabilities for this.

"Anthropic released vibe coded C compiler that doesn't work" sounds like https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1 passed through a game of telephone. The compiler has some wrong defaults that prevent it from straightforwardly building a "Hello, world!" like GCC and Clang. The compiler works:

> The 100,000-line compiler can build a bootable Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V. It can also compile QEMU, FFmpeg, SQlite, postgres, redis, and has a 99% pass rate on most compiler test suites including the GCC torture test suite. It also passes the developer's ultimate litmus test: it can compile and run Doom.

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler

westurner 8 hours ago||||
Prompts for this?

The primary objective is to retarget PyPy on top of the Python main branch. A minor objective is to document what of PyPy can be ported to CPython (or RustPython).

Keep a markdown log of issues in order to cluster and close when fixed

Clone PyPy and CPython.

Review the PyPy codebase and docs.

Prepare a devcontainer.json for PyPy to more safely contain coding LLMs and simplify development

Review the backlog of PyPy issues.

Review the CPython whatsnew docs for each version of python (since and including 3.11).

What has changed in CPython since 3.11 which affects PyPy?

Study the differences between PyPy code and CPython code to understand how to optimize like PyPy.

Prepare an AGENTS.md for PyPy.

Prepare an agent skill for upgrading PyPy with these and other methods.

Write tests to verify that everything in PyPy works after updating it to be compatible with the Python main branch (or the latest stable release, CPython 3.14)

tjpnz 16 hours ago||||
Strikes me as the worst possible solution if they're struggling to find maintainers in the first place. Who reviews the vibe coded patches?
riedel 17 hours ago|||
> Anthropic released vibe coded C compiler that doesn't work, how their LLM can help in maintaining PyPy?

This is the perfect question to highlight the major players. In my opinion, a rapidly developing language with a clear reference implementation, readily accessible specifications, and a vast number of easily runnable tests would make an ideal benchmark.

Hamuko 20 hours ago|||
Most maintainers don't have a stack of cash to throw at tokens.
croddin 19 hours ago||
They don’t need to throw a stack of cash at them, Anthropic and OpenAI have programs for open source maintainers.

https://claude.com/contact-sales/claude-for-oss https://openai.com/form/codex-for-oss/

Hamuko 19 hours ago||||
I'd say they're less of "programs" as they are "six-month trials". What's the plan after six months?

And for what's it worth, PyPy isn't even eligible for the Claude trial because they have a meager 1700 stars on GitHub.

ratijas 17 hours ago|||
If number of stars may help projects adopt AI, that makes me reconsider starring projects at all.
cozzyd 5 hours ago||
Better to pick projects not hosted on GitHub at all!
blitzar 18 hours ago|||
> What's the plan after six months?

An unmaintainable mass of Ai slop code and the decision to either pay the ai tax or abandon the project.

justinclift 17 hours ago|||
Isn't the Claude one only for a few months?

(I haven't checked the OpenAI one, as I have no interest in them)

simonw 16 hours ago||
Both programs have been announced as granting six months, but neither of them have explicitly said that there won't be options to renew for another six months.

I expect they haven't decided that themselves yet and don't want to commit publicly until they've seen how well the program goes.

latexr 16 hours ago||
Even if you’re right, no one should be making a decision of enrolling into those programs because maybe, with zero indication they’ll be renewed again in six months.

You know what they could also do? Stop the programs for new enrolments next month. Or if if they renew them like you said, it could be with new conditions which exclude people currently on them.

There are too many unknowns, and giving these companies the benefit of the doubt that they’ll give more instead of taking more goes counter to everything they showed so far.

simonw 12 hours ago|||
Is your argument here that you shouldn't accept the free trial because you might find it useful and then be trapped into paying for more of it later?
latexr 12 hours ago||
No, my argument is that your “but neither of them have explicitly said that there won't be options to renew for another six months” point is not something anyone should realistically be counting on, and is not a valid counter argument to your parent post of “Isn't the Claude one only for a few months?”.

We should be discussing what is factual now, not be making up scenarios which could maybe happen but have zero indication that they will.

simonw 11 hours ago||
I didn't say that I thought they would likely extend it, but I stand by my statement that it's a possibility.

Neither company have expressed that the six month thing is a hard limit.

The fact that OpenAI shipped their version within two weeks of Anthropic's announcement suggests to me that they're competing with each other for credibility with the open source community.

(Obviously if you make decisions based on the assumption that the program will be expanded later you're not acting rationally.)

localuser13 12 hours ago|||
If I understand correctly, they are literally giving things away for free for a 6 months period and we are complaining that they don't promise it stays free forever?
latexr 12 hours ago||
No, you did not understand correctly. They are not “literally giving things away for free”, they are providing a very conditional free trial, which is a business decision and not anything new. Then a commenter speculated they might extend that program because they didn’t say they won’t and I pointed out it doesn’t make sense to assume they will. No one on this immediate thread made any complaint, we’re discussing the facts of the offering.
dapperdrake 20 hours ago||
"You're completely right. That mushroom is poisonous."
shevy-java 19 hours ago|
What annoys me is the name. Early morning it took me a moment to realise that PyPy is not PyPi, so at first I thought they referred to PyPi. Really, just for the name confusion alone, one of those two should have to go.

Edit: I understand the underlying issue and the PyPy developer's opinion. I don't disagree on that part; I only refer to the name similarity as a problem.

stavros 16 hours ago||
There is no PyPi, it's PyPI (py pee eye), the Python package index.
dxdm 16 hours ago||
If you have to insist that a name needs a certain capitalization to properly exist, you're in the territory of brand zealotry and pedantry. The people who don't care for one reason or other vastly outnumber you, and they will invent your disfavored capitalization into existence. The same goes for pronunciation. GIF? Jira?

If your thing can be reached under "pypi.org", you can either accept that people will come up with their own ideas of how to capitalize or pronounce the name, or you can fight against windmills and tell people what ought to exist or not.

puzzledobserver 17 hours ago||
Wikipedia tells me that the package index PyPI (launched in 2003) is about 4 years older than the interpreter PyPy (first released in 2007).

Still, at its core, PyPy is a Python interpreter which is itself written in Python and the name PyPy fittingly describes its technical design.

scbrg 13 hours ago|||
No. PyPy development was ongoing long before the first release. The first intact commit in the PyPy repo is from February 2003: https://github.com/pypy/pypy/commit/6434e25b53aa307288e5cd8c.... And that commit indicates there's been development going on for a while already. The commit message is:

"Move the pypy trunk into its own top level directory so the path names stay constant."

PyPy migrated from Subversion to git at some point. Not sure how much of the history survived the migration.

aragilar 16 hours ago|||
I think back then PyPI was known as the cheeseshop, so there wouldn't have been the same confusion.