At the beginning of the current AI-assisted coding era, I was one of GitHub’s Copilot beta testers.

Around that time, Dinçer and I built bb-cli, a small command-line tool for working with Bitbucket from the terminal. It is a pure PHP CLI that lets you inspect pull requests, pipelines, branches, and other Bitbucket data without leaving the shell.

At the time, the project was partly useful tool, partly curiosity. I wanted to see what it actually felt like to build something with an AI coding assistant before the rest of the industry started treating that workflow as normal.

That is why I still like one line in the repository README: the tool was developed with help from GitHub Copilot. It captures a very specific moment. This was before the current wave of AI coding tools, when even trying to build something practical with AI assistance still felt experimental.

Why it feels special now

Recently, I noticed something I was not expecting: bb-cli is now available in Homebrew Formulae.

Not as a cask. As a proper formula.

That detail matters more than it may seem. A cask is usually the path for desktop apps and packaged binaries. A formula means the tool fits naturally into the standard Homebrew CLI workflow:

brew install bb-cli

For a small developer tool, that feels like a real milestone. It means the project became easy to discover, easy to install, and easy to keep updated in the same place people already manage the rest of their command-line tooling.

What I like about this most

The best part is not the packaging itself. It is the reminder that small tools can keep moving long after their first version ships.

bb-cli started as a side project built in an interesting technical moment: early Copilot, lots of curiosity, a real problem to solve, and a simple CLI shape that made sense immediately.

Now it has quietly crossed into a more mature state. It has releases, documentation, a Homebrew formula, and a cleaner path for anyone who wants to use it.

That kind of progress is easy to miss when it happens slowly.

Credit where it belongs

I built the tool with Dinçer, and that collaboration is part of why the project exists at all.

If you want to look at it:

It is still a small tool, which is probably why I like this story. Small tools do not need to become large companies or giant ecosystems to be worth building. Sometimes it is enough that they remain useful, survive, and unexpectedly earn a place in the default toolbox.