Replacing pip with uv

Recently I discovered uv as a potential replacement for pip. A single use paid off the switching costs.

It has three main advantages over pip:

• Speed
• Correctness
• Independence from the project

The speed advantage is obvious. The other two advantages warrant explanation.

I had installed Simon Willison’s excellent llm CLI tool for LLM use. When I used pip freeze to capture the current installation, it produced an invalid version for an sqlite3 library, necessitating a manual fix.

Some of my work uses FreeBSD. After installing the llm plugin llm-gpt4all, my project broke. Installation ran without error, but the plugin threw runtime error saying that FreeBSD is not supported. Failing to detect the lack of support at install time and relying on a run-time error is bad behavior to discuss elsewhere. At least the fix is easy, just uninstall llm-gpt4all.

Not so fast! When attempting uninstall, pip throws the same error! So pip is hosed because the project is hosed.

I created a new setup with uv instead of pip and found that uv freezes correct version numbers and also successfully uninstalls the module throwing the run-time error. That’s enough benefit to justify the switch.