· ai-devtools
The State of Python Profiling in 2026
In this post I look at where Python profiling stands today, compare Tachyon, py-spy, Scalene and Austin, and go through what's new in Austin 4.1.
Python profiling has changed more in the last two years than in the decade before. CPython 3.14 gave external tools an official way to look inside a running interpreter, and made asyncio task graphs inspectable from outside the process.
CPython 3.15 ships a sampling profiler in the standard library. Free-threaded builds have gone from experiment to something people actually deploy.
And a growing share of the people reading profiles aren't people at all, but coding agents. This post looks at where things stand: what the main sampling profilers can do today, where each one fits, and what changed in the latest release of Austin.
