#474 Astral to join OpenAI

31 snips

Mar 23, 2026

They discuss Starlette 1.0 and its new async lifespan API. The Astral team joining OpenAI and what Ruff, uv, and Ty might bring to Codex comes up. A security audit tool for uv and comparisons with pip-audit are covered. They also talk about Python asyncio fire-and-forget changes and how task GC affects background tasks.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Starlette 1.0 Lifespan Replaces Startup Hooks

Starlette 1.0 stabilizes the framework by removing long-deprecated code and committing to SemVer.
The new lifespan asynccontextmanager yields once for startup then continues after yield for shutdown, mirroring pytest fixtures and improving startup/teardown clarity.

INSIGHT

Ty Offers Deep Project Understanding For Codex

Ty (language server/type checker) may be the most strategically valuable Astral project for Codex because it provides deep, project-wide code understanding.
A language server can answer usage and call-site questions instantly versus ad-hoc grepping across files.

INSIGHT

Acquisition Was As Much About People As Code

Open-sourcing code doesn't prevent acquisitions because hiring the original engineers provides continuity and institutional knowledge.
Michael argues Astral's hire may be as much about the team (accu-hire) as adopting their code or product.

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

Get the app

Topics covered in this episode:

Starlette 1.0.0
Astral to join OpenAI
uv audit
Fire and forget (or never) with Python’s asyncio
Extras
Joke

Watch on YouTube

About the show

Sponsored by us! Support our work through:

Our courses at Talk Python Training
The Complete pytest Course
Patreon Supporters 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 11am 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.

Brian #1: Starlette 1.0.0

As a reminder, Starlette is the foundation for FastAPI
Starlette 1.0 is here! - fun blog post from Marcello Trylesinski
“The changes in 1.0 were limited to removing old deprecated code that had been on the way out for years, along with a few bug fixes. From now on we'll follow SemVer strictly.”
Fun comment in the “What’s next?” section:
- “Oh, and Sebastián, Starlette is now out of your way to release FastAPI 1.0. 😉”

Simon Willison

example of the new lifespan mechanism, very pytest fixture-like

@contextlib.asynccontextmanager
async def lifespan(app):
async with some_async_resource():
    print("Run at startup!")
    yield
    print("Run on shutdown!")
app = Starlette(
routes=routes,
lifespan=lifespan
)

Michael #2: Astral to join OpenAI

via John Hagen, thanks
Astral has agreed to join OpenAI as part of the Codex team
Congrats Charlie and team
Seems like **Ruff** and uv play an important roll.
Perhaps ty holds the most value to directly boost Codex (understanding codebases for the AI)
All that said, these were open source so there is way more to the motivations than just using the tools.
After joining the Codex team, we'll continue building our open source tools.
Simon Willison has thoughts
d iscuss.python.org also has thoughts
The Ars Technica article has interesting comments too
It’s probably the death pyx
- Simon points out “pyx is notably absent from both the Astral and OpenAI announcement posts.”

Brian #3: uv audit

Submitted by Owen Lemont
Pieces of uv audit have been trickling in. uv 0.10.12 exposes it to the cli help
Here’s the roadmap for uv audit
I tried it out on a package and found a security issue with a dependency
- not of the project, but of the testing dependencies
- but only if using Python < 3.10, even though I’m using 3.14
Kinda cool
Looks like it generates a uv.lock file, which includes dependencies for all project supported versions of Python and systems, which is a very thorough way to check for vulnerabilities.
But also, maybe some pointers on how to fix the problem would be good. No --fix yet.

Michael #4: Fire and forget (or never) with Python’s asyncio

Python’s asyncio.create_task() can silently garbage collect your fire-and-forget tasks starting in Python 3.12
Formerly fine async code can now stop working, so heads up
The fix? Use a set to upgrade to a strong ref and a callback to remove it
Is there a chance of task-based memory leaks? Yeah, maybe.

Extras

Brian:

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity - interesting read and unfortunate truth in too many places.
pytest-check - All built-in check helper functions in this list also accept an optional xfail reason.
- example: check.equal(actual, expected, xfail="known issue #123")
- Allows some checks to still cause a failure to happen because you no longer have to mark the whole test as xfail Michael:
TurboAPI - FastAPI + Pydantic compatible framework in Zig (see follow up)
Pyramid 2.1 is out (yes really! :) first release in 3 years)
Vivaldi 7.9 adds minimalist hide mode.
Migrated pythonbytes.fm and talkpython.fm to Raw+DC design pattern
Robyn + Chameleon package

Joke: We now have translation services