I Switched to uv and Stopped Hating Python Package Management

For years, requirements.txt was just something I tolerated. Then I tried uv — and dependency management went from a chore to a non-event. Here's my honest take on why I made the switch and never looked back.

I've been writing Python for years, and if there's one part of the workflow I never enjoyed, it was package management.

You know the drill. Create a virtualenv. Activate it. pip install a bunch of stuff. Then pip freeze > requirements.txt and pray the versions play nice on the next machine. Half the time they didn't. Someone would clone the repo, run pip install -r requirements.txt, and get a wall of red because some transitive dependency quietly broke.

It was boring. It was fragile. And honestly, I stopped thinking about it as "engineering" and started thinking of it as tax.

Then I tried uv.

The first thing that got me was the speed. Installing dependencies used to be a coffee break. With uv it's basically instant — like, "did it even run?" instant. It's written in Rust, and you feel it.

But the real win wasn't speed. It was that I stopped babysitting my environment.

No more manually creating venvs. No more pip freeze dumps full of packages I didn't actually ask for. uv handles the virtual environment, resolves dependencies properly, and keeps a clean lockfile so the next person (or the next machine, or future me) gets the exact same setup. Every time.

My whole flow now is basically:

uv init
uv add fastapi
uv run main.py

That's it. No activation dance. No requirements.txt drift. The pyproject.toml holds what I actually depend on, and the lockfile handles the rest.

I still remember the exact moment it clicked — I set up a fresh project on a new machine and everything just worked on the first try. No debugging, no version hunting. It felt weird, in a good way.

If you're still living in requirements.txt land and quietly dreading every dependency change, do yourself a favor and spend ten minutes with uv. The boring stuff finally becomes invisible, which is exactly what package management should be.