#541: Monty - Python in Rust for AI

When LLMs write code to accomplish a task, that code has to actually run somewhere. And right now, the options aren't great. Spin up a sandboxed container and you're paying a full second of cold start overhead plus the complexity of another service. Let the LLM loose on your actual machine and... well, you'd better be watching. On this episode, I sit down with Samuel Colvin, creator of Pydantic, now at 10 billion downloads, to explore Monty, a Python interpreter written from scratch in Rust, purpose-built to run LLM-generated code. It starts in microseconds, is completely sandboxed by design, and can even serialize its entire state to a database and resume later. We dig into why this deliberately limited interpreter might be exactly what the AI agent era needs. Episode sponsors Talk Python Courses Python in Production Links from the show Guest Samuel Colvin : github.com CPython : github.com IronPython : ironpython.net Jython : Pyodide : pyodide.com monty : github.com Pydantic AI : pydantic.dev Python AI conference : pyai.events bashkit : github.com just-bash : github.com Narwhals : narwhals-dev.github.io Polars : pola.rs Strands Agents : aws.amazon.com

You can listen to #541: Monty - Python in Rust for AI online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

#541: Monty - Python in Rust for AI is an episode from Talk Python To Me - Python conversations for passionate developers by Michael Kennedy.

This episode is 65:44 long.

This episode was published on Mar 19, 2026.

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