[falcor84]

That code has many issues, but the one that bothers me the most in practice is this tendency of adding imports inside functions. I can only assume that it's an artifact of them optimizing for a minimal number of edits somewhere in the process, but I expect better.

[kccqzy]

It's to make imports lazy, to solve the issue of slow import at startup.

[falcor84]

While there are some cases where lazy imports are appropriate, this function, and the vast majority of such lazy imports that I get from Claude are not.

In particular, I can't think of any non-pathological situation where a python developer should import logging and update logging.basicConfig within an inner function.

[Maxion]

It's also a trick in python to deal with circular imports.

[jamster02]

I also recently ran into a problem when unit testing and monkey patching where I had to import after monkey patching, so in the function itself.

[natnat]

I think this has a lot to do with the mechanism of RoPE attention, where physical closeness in the code is a signal of relevance.

[andrewmcwatters]

In very, very large projects, you end up finding that you want lazy initialization as much as possible, because it greatly affects startup times.