It seems to have become "the thing" to do. I can't figure out if it is bad as it feels. Why would I run `curl | bash` on something that could be doing literally anything. It feels crazy that all the lessons we've learned just get thrown away.

On the other hand, just because I run `brew install someapp`, it somehow feels safer, but why? That app could be doing anything too.

I just learned these two:

1. If the connection dies mid transfer, bash will still execute it.

So `rm -rf ~/.local/bin/whatever` can become `rm -rf ~`

The author can avoid this by wrapping everything in a function. But you wouldn’t know if they did so if you aren’t outputting it to a file first.

2. Say the link points to an S3 bucket and it gets compromised, there’s no record of the payload to analyze.

I’m sure there’s a plethora of other subtleties, but I’ve always had the same question as you and thought I’d share.

Convenience. That's usually the answer.

One thing I dislike is that the installer wants super user permissions. That’s a big no-no with JavaScript apps installing global components. All global machine state should be managed with package managers, preferably only one package manager.

The project is vibe-coded slop and coding LLMs are not famous for using obvious or minimalistic approaches.