Great post here from Andrew, particularly on why Homebrew doesn’t need a NPM-style cooldown.
nesbitt.io
Package Managers Need to Cool Down
A survey of dependency cooldown support across package managers and update tools.
Thoughts
Short thoughts that are cross-posted to X (Twitter), Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn and Threads.
Should be obvious but seems it’s not: don’t spam OSS maintainers or coworkers with AI code you’ve not reviewed yourself.
For coworkers only, sometimes fine explaining your testing and why reviewed isn’t necessary e.g. a one-time script.
https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/anti-patterns/
simonwillison.net
Anti-patterns: things to avoid
Agentic Engineering Patterns
It’s hard to understate just how much more productive coding agents are at some tasks in YOLO mode. Essential to have a good sandbox for this, though. My favourite so far is sandvault: no Docker nonsense needed.
https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault
github.com
GitHub - webcoyote/sandvault
Run AI agents isolated in a sandboxed macOS user account
The year is 2068. All matter in the solar system has been consumed for energy. All energy is used for the system’s sole remaining purpose: AI generation of another new frontend for Homebrew.
The author and I are convinced AI is net positive in engineering today but worth engaging seriously with the downsides.
https://tomwojcik.com/posts/2026-02-15/finding-the-right-amount-of-ai/
tomwojcik.com
What AI coding costs you
What's the effect of the prolonged AI usage among coders and is it tracked correctly, if it all?
Google continues to take money for malware pretending to be Homebrew installation.
There’s nothing Homebrew can do about this. Google needs to fix it.
Please put me in contact with someone at Google high enough level to actually fix it.
https://github.com/Homebrew/install/issues/1074
github.com
Google keyword `brew` points to a malicious site with false Homebrew install instructions · Issue #1074 · Homebrew/install
your problem was from running the official install or uninstall script? you carefully read the output and it was not a git fetch or other connection issue to GitHub (that Homebrew has no control ov...
Andrew nails here many parts of what actually makes OSS maintaining hard work.
Empathy is needed more for OSS sustainability than money.
https://nesbitt.io/2026/02/13/respectful-open-source.html
nesbitt.io
Respectful Open Source
Maintainer attention as a finite resource.
“This new technology will replace developers!” is not a new thing.
Nice look at what some previous claims were (and how they resulted in more developers and more software).
https://www.caimito.net/en/blog/2025/12/07/the-recurring-dream-of-replacing-developers.html
www.caimito.net
Why We've Tried to Replace Developers Every Decade Since 1969
Every decade brings new promises: this time, we'll finally make software development simple enough that we won't need so many developers.
Great take about the cultural requirements to create “10x engineers”
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/sometimes-your-job-is-to-stay-the-hell-out-of-the-way/
randsinrepose.com
Sometimes Your Job is to Stay the Hell Out of the Way
I wrote a piece a long time ago about the mythical 10x engineer, except that they aren't a myth.
All the “faster Homebrew in Rust” projects are a bit like parsing HTML with regex.
The simplest use-cases seem to work, it’s easier and there’s just edge cases to fix.
Fixing these edge cases requires recreating Homebrew and using Ruby (which will be slower again).