100% agree on your comment. For a package manager, speed is aspiration but security and reliability are basic requirements. And the credibility is a big plus. Today anyone can build a package manager in a week with AI, but once the system grows, how is the team going to manage? This is where credibility matters.

> If there is one place that I want human input over LLM it's here. It needs to scream: smart humans are in control and overseeing the project. I don't see that here.

How is Homebrew fundamentally different (as of today) - they vibe code. For example, the new app BrewUI is vibe coded, Claude is #2 contributor.

Does this scream "smart humans"?

Maybe Homebrew is reliable, but do not assume it is safe. It has always operated on the honor system for contributions and code review. Every maintainer is able to merge anything they want without review or signatures. No matter how good their intentions, Homebrew is a massive supply chain attack waiting to happen.

The biggest challenge with all these new packages coming up is support for edge cases and maintainability over the years.

AI may make it easy to clone or port something to a new language but it will later need a dedicated human to put in a shift and fine tune it.

So unless you are ready to keep jumping to the newest, it's better to stay with the trusted for now.

Smart humans?

Is it smart to deprecate everything the minute Apple sunsets their OS version?

This is not a smart package manager, its a manager for the “dumb” masses, that need to be saved and protected from themselves by forcing them into the next walled garden, so to speak…

Another recommendation for mise, in my case it has already fully replaced brew, stow and direnv since I started using it this January, and it has many more features I'm not using yet (secret management, tasks, automation, ...), all from a single rust binary. Also, unlike homebrew/linuxbrew, the install path for apps can be set to anywhere and is fully portable (it's all relative symlinks).

So far I never had any issue with it or any backward incompatibilities when upgrading, despite the very frequent releases and constant new features. The developer also seems very security minded (he immediately added a "minimum release age" feature for all apps when the trivy github action debacle was made public)

Oh! I thought it was a wrapper around brew so you could list all your tools in one place, but you’re right, it bypasses homebrew altogether. Nice.

I’ve recently started using mise to manage dotfiles, including its own config, and sync them on all my systems. Now I can easily have all the same packages installed everywhere. I am loving mise a lot these days.

i benchmarked it locally a few weeks ago and it's much faster than homebrew 7

how much faster is kind of a useless metric: it's so highly variable on which command and things like network speed, expect 2x-1000x faster depending on what we're talking about

mise is great with running multiple versions of a package, something I've found not very seamless with brew.

TIL. Thanks for that!

We certainly have no shortage of "universal package managers". Most package managers try to do just that.

May I introduce you to the lord and savior Bazel (or CMake if Google gives you the ick)

it's called codex / claude code as far as i'm concerned

Some combination of

- homebrew maintainers wouldn't be interested in accepting this as a PR unless it's actually maintainable, as they're the ones who would have to take responsibility for maintaining it going forward. And it needs to integrate well with the existing architecture, be well-designed and well-documented, have a migration plan and fallbacks for edge cases that are currently supported but won't work with this, etc. OPs implementation works, but is some combination of hacked together / slopcoded and it would take a lot of work to get it into a shape that could be accepted upstream. OP isn't interested in (or isn't capable of) putting in that work.

- "I made zerobrew, with 7.6K GitHub stars and thousands of users" sounds more impressive than "I made a contribution to homebrew that sped up package installation by up to 100x" despite the latter being both harder and more useful.

Open source projects have insane levels of gatekeeping nowadays.

It’s sad, but also makes some sense.

Nobody wants to maintain someone else’s AI slop when they could do their own version of the slop.

If you ask an AI agent to make some nice benchmarks for your readme, it will often include extra comparisons that aren't particularly relevant.

None, unless you happen to enjoy installing the same thing over and over again on the same machine.

I guess the LLM reward hacked instead of solving the problem

I wonder how the industry has not yet learned to use ASD-STE100 Simple Technical English for documentation. It makes it so much more polished and so much less AI-sloppy.

I don't think MacPorts users have those kind of problems.

Personally I was burnt by Homebrew many years ago already. I lost trust in any such package managers. Since then I went back to just compile everything myself (I manage about 300 packages like that in my installation.) It's not that a big of problem. Only initially when you need to bootstrap everything to replace Homebrew it was quite the time investment, of course. But now you compile like a package here or there… just follow the script. It's very quickly done.

The best thing… no clutter. Every package has its strict directory. I only symlink from that what I need into /usr/local/bin.

They don't owe me anything, but cutting off intel support the moment apple doesn't release the newest OS feels to soon for me.

Thanks to LLMs I just vibe my own package management system based on debian packages and have my own registry now with stuff that I care about

Intel macOS is only marginally supported by upstream Homebrew:

https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers

Maybe take a look at Nix+Homemanager.

for a while now - macports for the intel aficionados

It's on the frontpage of HN in 2026, of course it's vibecoded.

Latest version of brew is now fast enough for making having a faster version useless IMHO.

no, it was an experiment, now archived

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew-rs

Very zero

If the OS doesn't come with a package manager, how do you propose installing a package manager?

curl && tar -x && ./configure && make install ? Guess what, it's the same with more steps.

No, you can't, old guys. :-)