While there are some cases where lazy imports are appropriate, this function, and the vast majority of such lazy imports that I get from Claude are not.

In particular, I can't think of any non-pathological situation where a python developer should import logging and update logging.basicConfig within an inner function.

It's also a trick in python to deal with circular imports.

I also recently ran into a problem when unit testing and monkey patching where I had to import after monkey patching, so in the function itself.