wat (via) This is a really neat Python debugging utility. Install with pip install wat-inspector
and then inspect any Python object like this:
from wat import wat
wat / myvariable
The wat / x
syntax is a shortcut for wat(x)
that's quicker to type.
The tool dumps out all sorts of useful introspection about the variable, value, class or package that you pass to it.
There are several variants: wat.all / x
gives you all of them, or you can chain several together like wat.dunder.code / x
.
The documentation also provides a slightly intimidating copy-paste version of the tool which uses exec()
, zlib
and base64
to help you paste the full implementation directly into any Python interactive session without needing to install it first.
Recent articles
- OpenAI's new open weight (Apache 2) models are really good - 5th August 2025
- ChatGPT agent's user-agent - 4th August 2025
- The ChatGPT sharing dialog demonstrates how difficult it is to design privacy preferences - 3rd August 2025