This is a follow-up to the Small Python idea. I burned one more day of tokens to benchmark it and improve the performance. The setup is the same: one single Claude Code session, with /remote-control enabled so that I can prompt it while I’m out. In the morning I attended a local farm event, and in the afternoon we went trick-or-treating for Halloween.
The agent is capable of finding opportunities and fixing them correctly. Often it can run a few hours before it prompts me with more potential things to fix. I generally just ask it to continue.
At one point it stopped and claimed it wouldn’t gain much more, while it was still 1.3x–1.5x slower than CPython. I gave it a few ideas, and now it runs at 0.98x–1.1x of CPython.
In the end, I’m more than happy to ship a new version: Small Python v0.4.0.