Am I alone in thinking type hints are largely a waste of time in Python and can be actively harmful?
I had claude run ty via this new "uv check" on a moderately sized Python package (cli+tui to a multi-transport messaging system) and it found 67 things. Claude checked each finding for bugginess and found 1 is marginally worth fixing. A large fraction of the findings were ty guessing the type and being wrong. Hinting would I guess remove those wrong guesses but hinting is a PITA and greatly increases code size, both of which is bad for human and LLM.
Do people really get benefit from going all-in with type hinting?
I work mostly with Python and I cannot image my life without type hints.
If you ever had to maintain anything in prod, they're a must.
I would understand the view of some people thinking "why even use python then" but that's a whole other conversation.
Type annotations are generally great, if you've never had the displeasure of working with Python pre type-annotations, you'd know that tracking down "wtf type even is this" was a big part of just working in Python. The extra text/tokens spent on annotations are 100 % worth it, both for humans and LLM.
An issue you run into these days is that even if you have excellent type checking on your own code, some libraries don't. You of course want to avoid such libraries, or see if you can find type stubs. Gradual typing can suck, but well-typed Python is a bliss.
This feels like rage bait, but yes they do, that’s why it was added to Python after decades of not having it.