mastodon 4.7.3(she/her) I like to teach, learn, and create. Currently a Principal Cloud Advocate in Python at Microsoft.
🏳️🌈 Happy Pride! 🏳️🌈
May everyone love freely.
👩🏽❤️💋👩🏼 👨🏼❤️👨🏿 👩🏻❤️👨🏼
Great intro to git worktrees from @nzakas@fosstodon.org:
https://humanwhocodes.com/blog/2026/07/introduction-git-worktrees/
The GitHub Copilot app uses worktrees by default, and it reallly helps to understand them, since a worktree will *not* have files from the main checkout like a gitignored .env.
As a life-long Photoshop addict, I love that the web is now powerful enough for basic photo editing operations. I've been using http://photopea.com, as it's free and mimics the Photoshop UI and shortcuts.
GitHub launched stacked PRs today!
https://github.blog/changelog/2026-07-30-stacked-pull-requests-are-now-in-public-preview/
Who's started using them already?
Link me to your stack. 🥞
Just discovered Hillel Wayne's Crossover Project, where he interviews a bunch of "trad" engineers who became SWEs, to decide if SWE is really "engineering".
I know we all have gut reactions, but read it!
https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/crossover-project/
Next week, my Microsoft colleague and I are running a livestream series showing how to ground AI apps in real data: "Microsoft IQ Deep Dive with Python"
We'll cover:
🗓️ July 28–30, 10 AM PT 👉🏼 Register: https://aka.ms/IQDeepDivePython/series
Great intro to "product quantization", a vector compression technique used by ColBERT.
https://isaacflath.com/writing/QuantizationFundamentalsForMultiVectorRetrieval
The new MCP spec is officially out!
https://blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/2026-07-28/
To celebrate, my colleague and I are hosting a 5-hour livestream on September 9 on the VS Code YouTube channel. Join MCP maintainers and builders for talks about MCP Authorization, Tasks, Apps, and more.
Register @ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/reactor/events/27448/
Released new version of axe-core-playaxe-playwright-python for automated a11y testing of websites:
https://pypi.org/project/axe-playwright-python/
Thank you to the community for their PRs keeping it up to date with latest axe-core accessibility checks.
"Do automated evals work?"
https://parlance-labs.com/blog/posts/auto-evals/
Hamel and Antaripa use multiple LLM-powered tools to identify failures in app traces and compare results to labels from a domain expert. LLMs caught some errors that humans missed, but missed big errors that humans flagged. Read the post for their recommendations.
We got a Copilot stuffie, and now my kid is walking "little baby Copilot" around in a stroller, saying "shh Copilot is crying, pobrecito Copilot." 😆
Super interesting paper:
"Prompt Injection as Role Confusion"
https://role-confusion.github.io/
They trained a linear probe to predict roles (user/tool/assistant), and then experimented with injecting role tags and just changing the writing style to mimic a role (like ing).
I love my cute lil iPhone 13 mini that fits in all my pockets, but its battery is on its last legs. What's the dantiest modern iPhone I can get?
I am so done with LLMs adding inline imports to my Python code. Who does that??
Adding this prompt to my global instructions to hopefully dissuade inline imports forever.
uvicorn, why can't i quit you?!?!
Got a bunch of spam comments on a commit this morning. Time to shut that down!
(GitHub > Settings > General > Commits)
Who's coming to PyCon sprint days this year? Debating whether to attend - it makes a long trip away from home even longer, but I also hear it's really a great experience.
You can now watch my talk from PyAI about improving MCP server tool schemas to increase agent reliability:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0McGgmngeU
Also check out the:
* Slides: https://pamelafox.github.io/py-ai-mcp-tool-schemas/
* Repo: https://github.com/pamelafox/py-ai-mcp-tool-schemas
* Write-up: https://blog.pamelafox.org/2026/03/do-stricter-mcp-tool-schemas-increase.html
my 7-yr-old wants a karaoke machine for her bday!
how do karaoke machines work in the modern age?
notably, we have no TV, only a projector with chromecast.
any recommendations?
people are seriously sleeping on the cuteness of skipper butterflies!
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1081332-Lon-melane
attached for evidence: a skipper in my garden today
My Posette talk is now on YT-
"An MCP for your Postgres DB"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3_JPHuXgDyQ
I build a Python FastMCP server, starting with free-form SQL tools, then read-only tools, then typed query-specific tools.
Slides:
https://pamelafox.github.io/mcp-for-postgres-db-demo/
Check your Python deps if you have litellm -
there's a supply chain attack in litellm 1.82.8:
https://futuresearch.ai/blog/litellm-pypi-supply-chain-attack/
"OSS in the Age of AI: PyAI Panel discussion"
https://pydantic.dev/articles/pyai-oss-panel
Going to be on the BART for 4 hours today!
First, it's down to San Jose for NVIDIA GTC:
https://www.nvidia.com/gtc/
Then it's back up to SF for the DSpy meetup:
https://luma.com/je6ewmkx
“the goal today is for you to understand data classes, because one day you’ll outgrow them. “ - Brett Slatkin #PyBay2025
FastMCP v3 has 5 ways of building MCP apps:
1. Prefab apps (common UI components)
2. FastMCPApp (UI composability)
3. Generative UI (LLM-generated)
4. Custom HTML (DIY HTML/CSS/JS)
5. App providers
https://gofastmcp.com/apps/overview
Which Ollama SLMs are people using *successfully* with agent frameworks like Langchain/Pydantic-AI/Agent-framework/etc?
I am trying qwen3.5:9b since that's best I can run on my 16GB RAM Mac, but it often outputs in chinese and forgets its original task.
#Python 3.11 support just landed for #Pyodide! https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/pull/3252
(Benchmarks are being attempted in https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/issues/3503)
Wrote up a quick post about loading multiple Python versions using Pyodide: https://blog.pamelafox.org/2023/02/loading-multiple-python-versions-with.html
My colleague and I are running a new livestream series:
Microsoft IQ Deep Dive with Python
We'll cover:
* Foundry IQ (Azure AI Search): create multi-source knowledge bases with hybrid search and re-ranking
* Fabric IQ: query ontologies from MS Fabric
* Work IQ: query M365 data like teams, chats, calendar events, etc
🗓️ July 28–30, 10 AM PT
👉🏼 Register: https://aka.ms/IQDeepDivePython/series
I wrote a new blog post showing how you can build MCP servers using FastMCP with Microsoft Entra ID and pre-authorized VS Code client:
https://blog.pamelafox.org/2026/04/building-mcp-servers-with-entra-id-and.html
My current guilty pleasure is watching “Love is Blind: Argentina” - but I figure it’s educational, since it’s all in spanish!
Argentinian spanish is a fascinating dialect, it has a lot of sound changes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rioplatense_Spanish
mcp-server-diff: A GitHub action for detecting differences in MCP servers between versions.
https://github.com/SamMorrowDrums/mcp-server-diff
Good way to ensure all agent-facing MCP server changes are intentional!
"Mirage: The Illusion of Visual Understanding"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21687
New research shows that multimodal LLMs may base their answer/reasoning on a non-existent image. Includes a new eval framework B-Clean for filtering compromised questions in benchmarks.
