for more context - trying to sell if to people who might only have had experience with bazel, or not much experience with build at all

like DS

In the last few years Python use has skyrocketed, thanks to its advanced features, its prominence in data science, and its strong ecosystem of frameworks and tools. As a result, developer workflows in Python repos of all scales - resolving dependencies, generating code, testing, typechecking, linting, formatting, packaging and more - are becoming slower, flakier and harder to work with. Pants is a state-of-the-art build system that manages those workflows for you. Pants installs, orchestrates and runs the underlying tools - pip, pytest, mypy, flake8, black, setuptools and many more. It sequences outputs to inputs, uses concurrency to leverage all the cores on your laptop or CI machine, and caches every fine-grained unit of work, so that small code changes don’t trigger huge amounts of repeated effort.  You type a simple command like

./pants test path/to/some/tests

and Pants does the tricky work of figuring out what steps are needed to carry out that command, which tools are needed to run those steps, and how they all fit together. Pants even supports remote caching and execution, so you can share build work across your team with even greater concurrency. Pants significantly improves on earlier build tools: it requires very little configuration and metadata, as it can infer your code’s dependencies via static analysis. It’s designed for real-world Python usage at companies of all sizes, as opposed to the idiosyncratic needs of a single large company. It comes “batteries included”, with support for over 20 Python tools out of the box. And its powerful plugin API makes it easy to extend with new functionality. Pants is supported by a robust, friendly, helpful, open-source community. We actively seek out contributions, bug reports and feature requests and are responsive to user needs. Any organization or individual can have an equal voice in the community. In the last decade Python has “grown up” to become a state-of-the-art language. It deserves a state-of-the-art build experience. Pants is that system!

That would have to be a long-ish elevator ride

So I try to use the terminology "developer workflow" to introduce the concept of Python still having a "build"

this is gold 🥇

@ambitious-student-81104 any feedback you have for that doc, we'd love to hear. It's brand new messaging, so hearing what folks seem to find unanswered, unclear, etc is really valuable; as is hearing which points really landed with them. We know Pants can benefit a lot more people who don't know it yet.

it's very good, with high level and specific examples

if you have a table of side by side comparison that's even better 💯

Probably going to be public with (a version of) it soon anyway...