I have zero issues with people vibe coding alternative Homebrew frontends, it's good for the ecosystem for there to be more experimentation.

What I take objection to is when one or more of these happen:

- incorrect compatibility claims are made (e.g. if you're not running Ruby, no post-install blocks in formulae are gonna work) - synthetic benchmarks are used to demonstrate speed (e.g. running `brew reinstall openssl` in a loop is not a terribly representative case, instead a e.g. cold `brew upgrade` of >10 packages would be). to be clear, I'm sure most of these projects are faster than Homebrew in fair benchmarks too! - incorrect claims about why Homebrew is slow are made (e.g. "we do concurrent downloads and Homebrew doesn't": true a year ago, not true since 5.0.0 in November 2025) - it's pitched as a "replacement for Homebrew" rather than "an alternative frontend for Homebrew" when it's entirely reliant on our infrastructure, maintainers, update process, API, etc.

Even on the above: of course people are free to do whatever they want! It's just at least some of the above hinders rather than helps the ecosystem and makes it harder rather than easier for us as a wider open source ecosystem to solve the problem "Homebrew is slow" (which, to be clear, it is in many cases).

There’s a new vibe coded Homebrew frontend with partial compatibility and improved speed every few weeks.

Homebrew is working on an official Rust frontend that will actually have full compatibility. Hopefully this will help share effort across the wider ecosystem.

Homebrew's most significant changes since 5.0.0 are expanded `brew bundle` support, `brew version-install`, new `-full` formula handling and installer updates.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341150

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

I also found the author to be helpful and responsive and the tool to be nicely minimalistic rather than the usual vibe coded ever expanding mess.

‘brew install sandvault’ and running ‘sv’ should get you going.

(full disclosure: I created the Homebrew formula and submitted a few PRs to the project)

Attacking my communication here doesn’t help you. I got involved in this thread after seeing someone saying they regret sharing this (interesting) project from your reaction and feeling the same way after your reaction to something I’ve shared. Feel free to ignore me as is your right.

Yup, you're right, I should have. We will adjust the CONTRIBUTING.md accordingly.

> If this was true every oss project would either be dead or be entirely comprised of dicks, neither of which are the case.

I didn't say every OSS project, I said projects like Homebrew. I know that Homebrew would be dead without many of my personal interventions. You can believe me or not but, unless you're a Homebrew maintainer, it's unlikely your opinion about what happens behind the scenes is informed.

I'll take critique from other maintainers who have done as much or more open source work for similar returns over similar time periods. Funnily enough, I'm friends with many, and they are supportive the vast majority of the time instead of critical. Maybe that's because they can relate and you cannot.

In this issue's case, you have someone in leadership (p-linnane) communicating that work needs to be done, a maintainer (carlocab) communicating what needs to be done to make this change. xtqqczze's attempt to get us to move backwards on an already made decision doesn't help anyone. We have a discussions forum (and, well, the rest of the internet) for discussion of the pros and cons of decisions made. There's no point maintaining the illusion that we're soliciting feedback or discussion on the issues tracker when we are not.

As to me being a dick: I've been maintaining Homebrew for 16 years. It's used by millions of people. My full-time job has never been doing so and I've never been paid a market rate for my work on it (not that I expect or perhaps even deserve so). My primary concern with Homebrew is keeping the project actually running. This primarily requires the time, energy and work of maintainers doing so in their free time. It also requires contributors who submit pull requests.

Go read through some merged pull requests some time and you will see moderately to very positive responses from me. That's because that's the work that keeps the project alive. It has almost died several times in the past and I've kept it going. You may think it hyperbolic but drive-by negativity by non-code-contributor users is the biggest existential risk to projects like Homebrew.

Yes, this only affects casks, not formulae, whether formulae are built from source or use Homebrew's bottles (binary packages) or bottles from taps.

We’d love to support everything indefinitely but lack the resources as a volunteer run open source project to do so, particularly when GitHub Actions and macOS itself will be stopping elements of their support for macOS Intel on similar timescales.