How to handle tuple creation in a generic way?

tuple.py

def my_tuple_function(t):
    """
    Return a new tuple of the same length containing only zeroes.
    """
    tuple_class = type(t)

    return tuple_class(*(0 for _ in t))  # works for namedtuple
    return tuple_class((0 for _ in t))  # works for plain tuple

The main reason I lean toward inspect is that once you inspect.signature the type, you can find out if certain argument sets would be legal to use when calling it.

Failing that, namedtuple classes all have the _make() method, and you can check for that. Which even simplifies your construction a bit:

def my_tuple_func(t):
    tuple_type = type(t)
    arg = (0 for _ in t)
    return tuple_type._make(arg) if hasattr(tuple_type, '_make') else tuple_type(arg)