Xonsh pushes the user towards Pythonic contructs over shell pipelines of general purpose tools (think xargs and friends), but these constructs are generally more verbose to use. This is in part due to the need to import them from the Python path with import .... Given that the shell rewards ease-of-writing over verbosity, this can make writing shell script in Python a less enjoyable experience for shell programmers.
Enter mod. mod is a simple xontrib that defines a mod builtin that attempts to resolve modules and their attributes:
>>> xontrib load mod
>>> mod.json.loads($(echo "[1, 2, 3]"))
[1, 2, 3]