I always learn something at the PyTexas training day. This year, I learned how little I actually know about Python imports.
Heather Crawford ran the morning session on sys.path, modules, and packages. I have been writing Python long enough to fix ImportError messages without understanding them. The mental model she gave us helped me make sense of it. Find, then bind. Everything flows from those two steps. I had to redo my imports multiple times during the lab exercises. I still need my notes to walk someone through the whole picture, but I have a map now where I had guesses before.
The afternoon was Bernát Gábor, a developer who maintains 30+ open source projects and has been deliberately working AI into his process. Watching him work with Claude Code live made the approach concrete. He challenged it, pointed it to commit history when it got things wrong, and made it earn its keep. The thing that stuck was that without acceptance criteria, AI optimizes for plausible, not the truth. Write the test first. Let the code serve the test.
Heather’s session gave me a mental model I did not have before. The next time I hit a stubborn import error, I know where to start.
Bernát’s session felt different. I left with confirmation and a short list of things to fix. The way I have been learning to work with Claude is on the right track. What I am taking back are the gaps he filled in. Two of these are that I’m not using slash commands nearly enough and a statusbar I did not know existed.
If you have never been to a tech conference, PyTexas is a good place to start. When you register, do not skip Friday.
