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Episode 312: Navigating AI in Open Source: Insights From Wagtail

The Real Python Podcast

Sep 25, 2026 1h 7m intermediate ai django web-dev
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Christopher Bailey
Christopher Bailey
Host
Meagen Voss
Meagen Voss
Guest
Thibaud Colas
Thibaud Colas
Guest

How should you manage AI contributions to an open-source project? How do you measure the impact of using AI tools for development, and what generative features do end users want from a content management system? This week on the show, we speak with Thibaud Colas and Meagen Voss from Wagtail about the complex considerations software organizations are currently facing.

Meagen is the Wagtail community manager, and Thibaud is a member of the core team. We discuss the impact of AI on a popular open-source project. We reference multiple articles they’ve written about managing these challenges.

We dig into wrangling AI-assisted contributions to the project. They share how they research options for open-weight AI models and inference providers. We also discuss building AI features into the Wagtail CMS. Finally, we touch on the recent release of Wagtail 8.0.

Topics:

  • 00:00:00 – Introduction
  • 00:01:49 – What is Wagtail?
  • 00:08:35 – Flood of AI submissions to open-source projects
  • 00:11:38 – Guidance for AI-led contributions
  • 00:20:43 – Security submissions
  • 00:21:56 – Ethical decisions about internal use of AI
  • 00:26:31 – Resurgence of web sites
  • 00:27:41 – Measuring benefits and performance
  • 00:32:49 – Models understanding your framework
  • 00:38:05 – Video Course Spotlight
  • 00:39:42 – Adding AI features to Wagtail for creators
  • 00:48:47 – Balancing the use of AI internally and the cost of inference
  • 00:55:29 – Advice for other open-source projects
  • 01:00:00 – Wagtail 8.0
  • 01:02:10 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
  • 01:04:10 – What do you want to learn next?
  • 01:05:56 – How can people follow your work online?
  • 01:06:43 – Thanks and goodbye

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