Mike McQuaid

The average developer needs to accept that the latest tier of foundation models writes better code than them. Most developers who think they are above average are not. It’s time to learn how to be effective writing code with AI or be left behind.

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

Proud my my mate Joe releasing his third excellent book. Funny, touching and hilarious.

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, stronger sandboxing, native macOS app, vulnerability checks, advisory database, end of macOS 10.15 support and Intel Macs to Tier 3.

Inside Modern Software Engineering with Homebrew’s Mike McQuaid Interviewed by Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots. Sami is back this week with Mike McQuaid as they take a deep dive into the importance of open source maintainers.

Some great people here doing some really interesting stuff.

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.

Why is Windows 11 so disliked by programmers – and can Microsoft do anything to change things? Interviewed by Keumars Afifi-Sabet on ITPro. “Stop trying to overrule my preferences on how to use my computer.”

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

Homebrew tightens tap security, begins work on its interface Interviewed by Anamarija Pogorelec on Help Net Security. “It’s probably aimed a little more at newcomers than experienced Homebrew users.”

Today, I’m proud to announce Homebrew 6.0.0. Since 5.1.0: secure tap trusting, faster JSON API, Linux sandboxing, better defaults, brew bundle improvements, improved performance, initial macOS Golden Gate support.

I gave a talk: The impact of AI on open source software development 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.

Flood of AI ‘garbage’ is pushing open-source developers to the limit Interviewed by Matthew Sparkes on New Scientist. “The skill right now is being able to skim and spot nonsense while investing as little of your own time as you possibly can.”

“It’s the duty of all Free Software developers to steal as much time as they can from their employers for software freedom.” Jeremy Allison, co-creator of Samba and, at the time, a Google employee. 🫡

Your regular reminder that shitting on OSS on social media is a selfish thing to do. Good job sapping volunteer maintainers’ motivation in exchange for your “internet points”. Next time: try rolling up your sleeves and contribute a fix to the problem you’ve identified.

I wonder how much of people loving or hating meetings is down to how well they can type or multitask.

This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright Interviewed by Emanuel Maiberg on 404 Media. “The ethics fucking suck. Open source isn’t just source code you download once. It’s an ongoing relationship.”

“I’m excited to work with you, the company seems great. I’m a little unwhelmed with the salary, though, is there any chance you can do better?” This sentence gets most who try a 0-10% new job pay increase with zero resentments. Paraphrase it and use it (even on me).

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.

This was a good read and reflects my experiences. It also made me think the answer to “what do we do with juniors/students and AI” is “actually teach them software engineering best practices, not just CS fundamentals”.

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

At work, you have two jobs: being good at your job, being pleasant to work with. You can sometimes get by for a while not doing them both but it’s hard to survive doing neither.

Ruby Central report reopens wounds over RubyGems repo takeover Interviewed by The Register. “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.”

Every time you open an issue or pull request with “No description provided”, an open source maintainer dies.

One of the strengths of Homebrew, despite it being unpopular, is being willing to break backwards compatibility when necessary. NPM’s unwillingness to do so reflects GitHub’s: both show excessive caution that harm both security and usability.

My talk “Ruby on Guard (Rails)” from Haggis Ruby 2024 is now on YouTube. Weird watching in hindsight when I was very much pre-AI. If anything, AI only makes the guardrails more important and valuable.

Job security for engineers is dead. Career security is what matters. You build it by learning, changing, taking risks, being reliable and stepping outside your lane. Your employer won’t prioritise your long-term career. You should.

This was a good read. Review is good but it does slow things down. With async PR review, I prefer the “✅ with comments” review. Unblock the person from merging with trust they will read and resolve your comments first.

Today I’m proud to announce the release of Homebrew 5.1.0. The most significant changes since 5.0.0 are expanded brew bundle support, brew version-install, new -full formula handling and installer updates.

Great post here from Andrew, particularly on why Homebrew doesn’t need a NPM-style cooldown.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Andrew nails here many parts of what actually makes OSS maintaining hard work. Empathy is needed more for OSS sustainability than money.

“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).

Great take about the cultural requirements to create “10x engineers”

I gave a talk: Package Management Learnings from Homebrew 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.

I gave a talk: What happened to RubyGems and what can we learn? Lessons for non-Ruby projects on non-profits, governance, money and access in open source, drawn from the RubyGems dispute.

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).

How Homebrew Became Mac’s Package Manager with Mike McQuaid Interviewed by Screaming in the Cloud.

This analysis was both helpful and hurtful. Another reminder to focus on a single task and ship to completion whenever possible.

The Most Important Skills Going Forward with CTO + Homebrew Maintainer Mike McQuaid Interviewed by .

“The Failure Mode of Clever (is asshole)” Applies to some OSS commenters I’ve seen… Great take from John Scalzi (who also writes GREAT sci-fi books).