Agentic coding has let me replace everyday tools with software that works how I want.

"It’s weird what years of conditioning by society can do to you"

Combine pager duty with incoming team requests to protect roadmap work and let engineers fix what woke them up

Today, I’m proud to announce Homebrew 7.0.0. The most significant changes since 6.0.0 are faster installations and upgrades, stronger sandboxing, a native macOS app, built-in vulnerability checks and an advisory database, the end of macOS 10.15 support and Intel Macs moving to Tier 3.

Sami is back this week with Mike McQuaid as they take a deep dive into the importance of open source maintainers.

Homebrew is thriving while other open source projects struggle. Its scarcest resource isn't money: it's maintainer motivation.

Memories of my friend and former GitHub coworker Jason Rudolph, who died in May 2026.

“Stop trying to overrule my preferences on how to use my computer.”

Merge-queue deploys, robust releases and chores you keep forgetting

“It’s probably aimed a little more at newcomers than experienced Homebrew users.”

Homebrew 6.0.0 has been released.

Five experienced open source practitioners cut through the hype to ask what AI is actually doing to the communities, projects, and humans that keep open source alive.

“The skill right now is being able to skim and spot nonsense while investing as little of your own time as you possibly can.”

A direct-action manifesto for maintainers keeping open source alive on company time.

“The ethics fucking suck. Open source isn’t just source code you download once. It’s an ongoing relationship.”

Stop babysitting one AI at a time. Sandboxing lets them run wild safely, Git worktrees let them run in parallel. Use more tokens, get more velocity.

Software engineering is undergoing a transformation similar to when structural design separated from craft construction to become civil engineering, with AI handling feature development while platform engineers focus on building safe, resilient systems.

Recreating office-style pranks in a remote AI-loving world

“If your project hasn’t argued about governance or money yet, it will one day. Be prepared and try to do this before it becomes a problem.”

The npm client's default settings are a root cause of JavaScript's recurring supply chain security problems.

Ruby is powerful, and you want to move fast. So having guardrails can be useful?

We've all heard of those network effect laws: the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of members.

Questions for current users to inform future Homebrew development

Homebrew 5.1.0 has been released.

A survey of dependency cooldown support across package managers and update tools.

Agentic Engineering Patterns

Run AI agents isolated in a sandboxed macOS user account

What's the effect of the prolonged AI usage among coders and is it tracked correctly, if it all?

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...

Maintainer attention as a finite resource.

Every decade brings new promises: this time, we'll finally make software development simple enough that we won't need so many developers.

I wrote a piece a long time ago about the mythical 10x engineer, except that they aren't a myth.

Homebrew 5.0.0 released in 2025. Walk through the major changes in 5.0.0, improving expectations based on other package managers and what they can learn from Homebrew's approach.

Lessons for non-Ruby projects on non-profits, governance, money and access in open source, drawn from the RubyGems dispute.

Companies are systems, and systems always have a bottleneck.

So, apropos of nothing in particular, let’s say you wish to communicate privately with someone

Raising kids in an addictive internet without losing your mind (or theirs)

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.