Post

I've just asked 3 AIs about the way to obtain, using the "uv" command, which is the version of the python runtime that is being used for the active virtual environment. I know I can use "python --version", but I was curious to see whether I could do everything with "uv".

1. Github Copilot (GPT-4.1) told me it was "uv python --version". I told it that a "--version" option didn't exist for "uv python", and that I was using uv version 0.8.17. Its response was that this "--version" option appeared in 0.1.0, so I needed to upgrade to that version 🤷

I reiterated that I used version 0.8.17, which is newer than 0.1.0 and, as a response, I obtained a lengthy explanation about how, contrary to what it seemed, 0.1.0 was in fact a newer version than 0.8.17 because the uv project had been rebooted after 0.8.0, back to 0.1.0 🤨

Interestingly, this explanation included a literal quote from the release notes explaining the reboot, and a link to such release notes where apparently I could verify that point myself. None of that was real. Version 0.8.17 was released five days ago.

2. So I asked Claude (Sonnet 4), and again it told me that I should use "uv python --version" (nope) and also that "uv python list" would give me a list of the installed python versions, indicating the currently active one (also nope on this last point).

I told it that "uv python --version" did not exist, and that I was using uv 0.8.17… and its response clarified that, in fact, the "uv python" subcommand had appeared in uv version 0.9.0, so I needed to upgrade 😕

So I explained that 0.8.17 was the latest version, released 5 days ago, and its response was that in such a case I should just use "python --version" without uv (OK, that's true, but I wanted a "uv" option). And again that "uv python list" would indicate the current one in the list (nope, nope).

I explained that point at the chat, and then came the first thing similar to a "good" answer: use "uv python find", which will output the path of the python runtime, then pipe it to "xargs -L 1 -I {} {} -V" to execute it and extract the version ("-V").