Armin Ronacher

Things Armin Says on Podcasts

Creator of Flask, one of the most widely used Python web frameworks, and an Austrian open source software developer. In 2025, he left Sentry and started a new company. Writes about software development, programming languages, and open source at his blog Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings. Published 36 posts in 2025 covering topics from Python practices to AI agents.

Where to Find Them

Armin Ronacher writes Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings . They have also been a guest on Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski) (2 times) , The Pragmatic Engineer (2 times) , Rustacean Station (2 times) , Real Python Podcast and Fragmented - AI Developer Podcast .

Recently: “312 - Understanding Pi Durable with Mario & Armin of Earendil” on Fragmented - AI Developer Podcast (October 2026); “What is Codemode” on Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings (October 2026); “Deser: Rethinking Rust Serialization” on Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings (September 2026); “Interpreting Pangram” on Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings (September 2026); “P(doom)” on Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings (September 2026); “Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?” on Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings (September 2026).

What They Said

“What is so confusing about using LLMs for coding right now is that you feel like you can solve any problem… but you don't end up with this really neat core design that has the least amount of possible states. It looks like it does, but it actually doesn't.” — Armin Ronacher, Fragmented - AI Developer Podcast

Armin Ronacher on why designing a small durable-execution library with Mario Zechner took repeated rewrites. Zechner had just said that you hit roadblocks with every design.

Fragmented - AI Developer Podcast · 2026-10-20 Permalink → Listen →
Fragmented - AI Developer Podcast Around 21:14 into the episode
Armin Ronacher

us really long to feel good about this.

Mario Zechner

And it's not like it's amazing in the sense of something entirely new. It's just you have to think through so much stuff that you're hitting roadblocks with every design. 100% eventually. And I think

Armin Ronacher

what is so confusing about using LLMs for coding right now is that you feel like you can solve any problem and you can sort of do, but you don't end up with this really neat sort of core design that has the least amount of possible states if you like, it looks like it does, but this actually doesn't.

Kaushik Gopal

This is one of the most tempting things. That's why I started with like, do you guys have some kind of philosophy? Because in this day and age, it's so tempting, right? Like it's so tempting to just throw an agent at it to solve the problem versus stepping back and thinking, no, no, but is this the…

Mario Zechner

I mean, again, it comes back to this. Can I keep it in my head? And I can keep PyDurable in my head for the most part. Obviously, some details, like how does the bash tool concretely handle, I don't know, Windows versus Unix-like systems in terms of process groups and child trust. I don't remember…

Kaushik Gopal

You briefly touched on like, you know, process ownership. And that's one of those questions I had as well. Because funny enough, you know, Mario, I know you released your sub-agent extension. I've had my own sub-agent Py plugin that's been there for some time. If you think about it from the surface…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

Collections They Appear In