March 16, 2026

#473 A clean room rewrite?

46 minutes

Topics covered in this episode:

chardet ,AI, and licensing

refined-github

pgdog: PostgreSQL connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder

Agentic Engineering Patterns

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: @[email protected] / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)

Brian: @[email protected] / @brianokken.bsky.social

Show: @[email protected] / @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.

Michael #1: chardet ,AI, and licensing

Thanks Ian Lessing

Wow, where to start?

A bit of legal precedence research.

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens on the Register

Also see this GitHub issue.

Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license. (LGPL → MIT)

Dan is allowed to make this change because v7 is a complete “clean room” rewrite using AI

BTW, v7 is WAY better:

The result is a 48x increase in detection speed for a project that lives in the hot loops of many projects. That will lead to noticeable performance increases for literally millions of users (the package gets ~130M downloads per month).

It paves a path towards inclusion in the standard library (assuming they don’t institute policies against using AI tools).

Thread-safe detect() and detect_all() with no measurable overhead; scales on free-threaded Python 3.13t+

An individual claiming to be Mark Pilgrim, the original creator of the library, opened an issue in the project's GitHub repo arguing that Blanchard had no right to change the software license, citing the LPGL requirement that the license remain unchanged.

A 'complete rewrite' is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a 'clean room' implementation).

Blanchard disagreed, citing how version 7.0.0 and 6.0.0 compare when subjected to JPlag, a library for detecting plagiarism.

Blanchard told The Register he had wanted to get chardet added to the Python standard library for more than a decade since it’s a core dependency to most Python projects.

Brian #2: refined-github

Suggested by Matthias Schöttle

A browser plugin that improves the GitHub experience

A sampling

Adds a build/CI status icon next to the repo’s name.

Adds a link back to the PR that ran the workflow.

Enables tab and shift tab for indentation in comment fields.

Auto-resizes comment fields to fit their content and no longer show scroll bars.

Highlights the most useful comment in issues.

Changes the default sort order of issues/PRs to Recently updated.

But really, it’s a huge list of improvements

Michael #3: pgdog: PostgreSQL connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder

PgDog is a proxy for scaling PostgreSQL.

It supports connection pooling, load balancing queries and sharding entire databases.

Written in Rust, PgDog is fast, secure and can manage thousands of connections on commodity hardware.

Features

PgDog is an application layer load balancer for PostgreSQL

Health Checks: PgDog maintains a real-time list of healthy hosts. When a database fails a health check, it's removed from the active rotation and queries are re-routed to other replicas

Single Endpoint: PgDog can detect writes (e.g. INSERT, UPDATE, CREATE TABLE, etc.) and send them to the primary, leaving the replicas to serve reads

Failover: PgDog monitors Postgres replication state and can automatically redirect writes to a different database if a replica is promoted

Sharding: PgDog is able to manage databases with multiple shards

Brian #4: Agentic Engineering Patterns

Simon Willison

So much great stuff here, especially

Anti-patterns: things to avoid

And 3 sections on testing

Red/green TDD

First run the test

Agentic manual testing

Extras

Brian:

uv python upgrade will upgrade all versions of Python installed with uv to latest patch release

suggested by John Hagen

Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It

NY Times Article

Suggested by Christopher

Best quote: “Pushing code that fails pytest is unacceptable and embarrassing.”

Michael:

Talk Python Training users get a better account dashboard

Package Managers Need to Cool Down

Will AI Kill Open Source, article + video

My Always activate the venv is now a zsh-plugin, sorta.

Joke: Ergonomic keyboard

Also pretty good and related:

Claude Code Mandated

Links

legal precedence research

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

this GitHub issue

citing

JPlag

refined-github

Agentic Engineering Patterns

Anti-patterns: things to avoid

Red/green TDD

First run the test

Agentic manual testing

uv python upgrade

Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It

Suggested by Christopher

a better account dashboard

Package Managers Need to Cool Down

Will AI Kill Open Source

Always activate the venv

now a zsh-plugin

Ergonomic keyboard

Claude Code Mandated

claude-mandated.png

blobs.pythonbytes.fm/keyboard-joke.jpeg?cache_id=a6026b

...more

View all episodes

By Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken

4.7

212212 ratings

March 16, 2026

#473 A clean room rewrite?

46 minutes

Topics covered in this episode:

chardet ,AI, and licensing

refined-github

pgdog: PostgreSQL connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder

Agentic Engineering Patterns

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: @[email protected] / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)

Brian: @[email protected] / @brianokken.bsky.social

Show: @[email protected] / @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.

Michael #1: chardet ,AI, and licensing

Thanks Ian Lessing

Wow, where to start?

A bit of legal precedence research.

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens on the Register

Also see this GitHub issue.

Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license. (LGPL → MIT)

Dan is allowed to make this change because v7 is a complete “clean room” rewrite using AI

BTW, v7 is WAY better:

It paves a path towards inclusion in the standard library (assuming they don’t institute policies against using AI tools).

Thread-safe detect() and detect_all() with no measurable overhead; scales on free-threaded Python 3.13t+

A 'complete rewrite' is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a 'clean room' implementation).

Blanchard disagreed, citing how version 7.0.0 and 6.0.0 compare when subjected to JPlag, a library for detecting plagiarism.

Blanchard told The Register he had wanted to get chardet added to the Python standard library for more than a decade since it’s a core dependency to most Python projects.

Brian #2: refined-github

Suggested by Matthias Schöttle

A browser plugin that improves the GitHub experience

A sampling

Adds a build/CI status icon next to the repo’s name.

Adds a link back to the PR that ran the workflow.

Enables tab and shift tab for indentation in comment fields.

Auto-resizes comment fields to fit their content and no longer show scroll bars.

Highlights the most useful comment in issues.

Changes the default sort order of issues/PRs to Recently updated.

But really, it’s a huge list of improvements

Michael #3: pgdog: PostgreSQL connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder

PgDog is a proxy for scaling PostgreSQL.

It supports connection pooling, load balancing queries and sharding entire databases.

Written in Rust, PgDog is fast, secure and can manage thousands of connections on commodity hardware.

Features

PgDog is an application layer load balancer for PostgreSQL

Health Checks: PgDog maintains a real-time list of healthy hosts. When a database fails a health check, it's removed from the active rotation and queries are re-routed to other replicas

Single Endpoint: PgDog can detect writes (e.g. INSERT, UPDATE, CREATE TABLE, etc.) and send them to the primary, leaving the replicas to serve reads

Failover: PgDog monitors Postgres replication state and can automatically redirect writes to a different database if a replica is promoted

Sharding: PgDog is able to manage databases with multiple shards

Brian #4: Agentic Engineering Patterns

Simon Willison

So much great stuff here, especially

Anti-patterns: things to avoid

And 3 sections on testing

Red/green TDD

First run the test

Agentic manual testing

Extras

Brian:

uv python upgrade will upgrade all versions of Python installed with uv to latest patch release

suggested by John Hagen

Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It

NY Times Article

Suggested by Christopher

Best quote: “Pushing code that fails pytest is unacceptable and embarrassing.”

Michael:

Talk Python Training users get a better account dashboard

Package Managers Need to Cool Down

Will AI Kill Open Source, article + video

My Always activate the venv is now a zsh-plugin, sorta.

Joke: Ergonomic keyboard

Also pretty good and related:

Claude Code Mandated

Links

legal precedence research

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

this GitHub issue

citing

JPlag

refined-github

Agentic Engineering Patterns

Anti-patterns: things to avoid

Red/green TDD

First run the test

Agentic manual testing

uv python upgrade

Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It

Suggested by Christopher

a better account dashboard

Package Managers Need to Cool Down

Will AI Kill Open Source

Always activate the venv

now a zsh-plugin

Ergonomic keyboard

Claude Code Mandated

claude-mandated.png

blobs.pythonbytes.fm/keyboard-joke.jpeg?cache_id=a6026b

...more

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#473 A clean room rewrite?

#473 A clean room rewrite?

More shows like Python Bytes

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

The a16z Show

Daily Tech News Show

Software Engineering Daily

Talk Python To Me

Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn

NVIDIA AI Podcast

Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

Tech Brew Ride Home

Practical AI

The Real Python Podcast

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

This Day in AI Podcast

The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis