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.