PyTexas 2026 ran April 17–19 in Austin. Friday was tutorials, Saturday and Sunday were talks with two keynotes and two lightning-talk blocks. A few themes kept coming back across unrelated talks:

Sovereignty. The word came up in two different keynotes. Hynek Schlawack: “the domain model must be sovereign”. Design it first, translate at the edges. Dawn Wages: “sovereignty over your stack” as one of her three pillars for both model and career specialization. Agents should write code, not decide what to write. Peter Sobot’s Seven Stages of AI Grief ended on that line. Al Sweigart argued “agentic engineering” is vibe coding with better marketing, and that almost-right is worse than wrong. Maria Silvia Mielniczuk’s MCP talk built the same idea into an architecture: models suggest, only the server executes. Adam Gordon Bell’s running coach split deterministic work (plain Python) from interpretation (LLM). The Sunday opener framed it bluntly: when AI ships a bad PR, fix the process, not the model. Code quality is an input to AI productivity. Miguel Vargas’s framing: AI agents produce cleaner, safer code in codebases that are already clean, safe, and typed, so Ruff, ty, and uv matter more now. The supply chain is still the attack surface. Christopher Ariza on why pip install still runs arbitrary code, with .pth files, sitecustomize.py, and setup.py as the specific places to pay attention. CPython itself is getting faster. Jacob Coffee on PEP 810 lazy imports for startup wins; Charlie Lin on the free-threaded build and what it takes to make an extension module safe under it.