Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

This also happens with tools you have to use but don’t get much payoff from—like internal tooling. At work, we have a shitty in-house feature flag service. It breaks all the time and is super finicky. Learning it properly doesn’t really help me, so I mostly copy and paste my way through it.

Another example is jq. I use it occasionally, and ChatGPT handles the syntax pretty well. For me, learning it properly just isn’t worth the time or effort.

Makefile syntax is also well understood by ChatGPT. If you want to know a suitable way for doing some task, ChatGPT can do it. It can also explain what another Makefile is doing.

Here's an example of a (similar) prompt I used recently: "Write me a makefile that executes a script inside a docker container. I want the script to be someprefix-<target-script> that calls /app/<target-script>.sh inside the container."

I don't have to care about Makefile syntax anymore for the most part.

Exactly. I used to go for Just and Go Task as Make alternatives, but not anymore. LLMs are great with Make syntax, and Make is everywhere.

> Another example is jq. I use it occasionally, and ChatGPT handles the syntax pretty well. For me, learning it properly just isn’t worth the time or effort.

This resonates with me, I was in exactly the same position when I needed to do something with `kubectl` JSON output - just ask ChatGPT because I couldn't be bothered to learn the unintuitive syntax.

Interestingly I _can_ blame the tool, because I started using Nushell[1] which has built-in JSON manipulation that provides a MUCH simpler syntax, and I have learnt this properly because it was that easy.

1: https://www.nushell.sh/

Try https://rcl-lang.org/ instead then, it has syntax that you can write without needing ChatGPT.

Nushell is awesome. Too bad the incompatibilities are still a bit too much for me to use it as a daily driver.

It’s easy to blame the tool, but sometimes the problem space is inherently complex. With limited time, building the right abstraction is an immensely difficult job. LLMs fixed this issue for me, and I’ve stopped complaining about unintuitive but ubiquitous tools.