Comment by simonw

The "declaring script dependencies" thing is incredibly useful: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#declaring-script-d...

  # /// script
  # dependencies = [
  #   "requests<3",
  #   "rich",
  # ]
  # ///
  import requests, rich
  # ... script goes here

Save that as script.py and you can use "uv run script.py" to run it with the specified dependencies, magically installed into a temporary virtual environment without you having to think about them at all.

It's an implementation of Python PEP 723: https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/

Claude 4 actually knows about this trick, which means you can ask it to write you a Python script "with inline script dependencies" and it will do the right thing, e.g. https://claude.ai/share/1217b467-d273-40d0-9699-f6a38113f045 - the prompt there was:

  Write a Python script with inline script
  dependencies that uses httpx and click to
  download a large file and show a progress bar

Prior to Claude 4 I had a custom Claude project that included special instructions on how to do this, but that's not necessary any more: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/19/one-shot-python-tools/