A while back I started building Nimble Agent — a LangChain-based coding agent in Python. The idea was to fix the things that annoy me about other AI agents: smarter prompting, cheaper models, and acceptance criteria so the agent can't just hand-wave "done" and stop.
It's an AI agent that writes code. Which means the one thing I could not afford was my own code lying to me about its types.
So I tried the standard Pylance extension and Pyright as a type checker. I was seriously underwhelmed.
Skip the hype. Install the extensions here:
More coming...
The Pylance wall
Python has a perfectly good type system, and almost nothing enforces it.
Pylance defaults to gradual typing. Untyped code sails straight through. A function with no annotations? Fine. An implicit Any swallowing an entire call chain? Fine. You opt into strictness, rule by rule, setting by setting — and even then half of it slides. My annotations weren't contracts. They were comments that happened to compile. For a tool whose whole job is generating Python, "your types are vibes" is a non-starter.
Then there's the part that actually made me angry: Pylance is proprietary and welded to Microsoft's official VS Code build. I don't live in vanilla VS Code. I might bounce between Cursor, Windsurf, sometimes Zed. The moment you step outside the Microsoft walled garden, the good experience evaporates — different engine, missing features, or a license that says you're not allowed to be there at all.
Moreover, I just couldn't figure out how to configure the type checker in vscode to analyze for all files. It would only show errors and warnings for the file I was editing even though I tried everything to configure it.
So I built Basilisk
Basilisk is an open-source Python language server, type checker, debugger, and profiler — written in Rust, shipped as a single binary, no Node runtime, no Python runtime, no Microsoft dependency.
The core stance is the whole pitch: strict by default, no permissive mode.
def greet(name):
return "Hello " + name
error[BSK-E0001]: Missing parameter type annotation for `name`
error[BSK-E0002]: Missing return type annotation
There's no --basic, no --permissive, no global "relax everything" knob. Rust doesn't ship a flag to disable the borrow checker; TypeScript's strict: true is just expected. Basilisk takes that stance for Python. Escape hatches exist — but the burden is on you to justify the exception, not to remember to turn the rule on. 151 diagnostics, all on, all the time.
The IDE extension gives you all the tools to ignore what you need to to ignore to start using Basilisk with your untyped Python, but it also gives you lots of tools to add types gradually.
But "strict checker" isn't the actual goal
The checker is the wedge. The real aim is the thing Pylance almost is and won't let you have everywhere: one extension that's your complete Python dev experience.
Out of one Rust binary, Basilisk gives you:
- 🧠 Type checking + inference (strict by default, targeting 100% PEP conformance)
- 🐛 Debugging (embedded debugpy, zero-config)
- 🔥 Profiling (py-spy, inline in the editor)
- 🧪 A test explorer (pytest/unittest with coverage overlay)
- 🔧 Real refactors — extract, inline, move-to-file, scope-aware rename, change signature
- 💡 Autofixes and formatting (delegated to Ruff — we don't reinvent the wheel)
And — the part that started this whole thing — the same experience everywhere: VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf (via Open VSX), plus Zed and Neovim. Because the LSP drives the functionality, not the IDE. The editor just reacts to it. Install once, get the full thing, wherever you write Python.
Where it's at
Basilisk is open source (MIT), built on the same parser that powers Ruff, with Salsa for sub-10ms incremental checks. I started it because I wanted my AI agent's Python to be as honest as TypeScript, in whatever editor I happened to have open. It turned into something a lot bigger.
If you've ever wanted Python to just say it out loud when your code isn't typed — give it a try.
Check out Nimblesite's other tools