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An LLM helped with the initial tedium of rewording 1000s of PRs from maintainer centric language into user centric language. It was reviewed and edited (by a human) probably >20 times. Go look at the PR if you don’t believe me.

I used to do these all by hand and they took me multiple hours. I still probably spent over an hour, including a bunch of time on a family holiday today. Comments like this make me wonder why I bother sometimes.

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Don’t let the reflexive grumps get you down.

homebrew is a critical, important piece of software, and I appreciate the effort.

I certainly don’t appreciate the non-effort from reflexive LLM-haters. We get it. You don’t like LLMs. Try to have an opinion and a personality that doesn’t revolve around nitpicking AI writing.


FWIW, I also got a bit of an LLM vibe skimming the changelog. In particular, the section about Linux sandboxing jumped out at me:

> Status in 7.0.0: kernels without Landlock continue working without Linux sandboxing in the less secure pre-6.0.0 configuration; brew doctor reports missing protection as an advisory.

> No replacement opt-out; unavailable Landlock remains advisory.

With that being said, I can kind of see why "eliminate all traces of AI writing styles" wouldn't be a goal of the review/editing process. I've been out of the Apple ecosystem for a while, but I imagine Homebrew has enthusiastically adopted LLMs for a lot of tasks. If the public communications reflect that, then people who don't like LLMs can bounce immediately, rather than getting invested in the project and feeling betrayed later.


Does it surprise you that people are getting more skeptical when the software that installs system packages is getting more and more generated by AI?

We have a Landlock (formerly Bubblewrap) Linux sandbox due to an LLM. It sat unfixed on our roadmap for almost a decade. I and at least one other maintainer (as well as several LLMs) reviewed every line of code.

Homebrew has never been better performant, secure, tested, linted and typed. I understand the LLM dubiousness (I used to share it myself) but we’re the type of project where it’s very easy to get agents to do sensible end-to-end testing and review a nice language (Ruby). Just us on our outputs, not just our inputs.

One of our former maintainers was in high school when working on Homebrew. I’m sure many people would have found that worrying. His code was great, though (I reviewed most of it) and he made the project better. Same ultimately with LLMs. Your mileage may vary.




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