When you have to mock a collaborator, avoid using the Mock object directly. Either use mock.create_autospec() or mock.patch(autospec=True) if at all possible. Autospeccing from the real collaborator means that if the collaborator's interface changes, your tests will fail. Manually speccing or not speccing at all means that changes in the collaborator's interface will not break your tests that use the collaborator: you could have 100% test coverage and your library would fall over when used!
Recent articles
- What happens if AI labs train for pelicans riding bicycles? - 13th November 2025
- Reverse engineering Codex CLI to get GPT-5-Codex-Mini to draw me a pelican - 9th November 2025
- Video + notes on upgrading a Datasette plugin for the latest 1.0 alpha, with help from uv and OpenAI Codex CLI - 6th November 2025