Knowing correct compile commands for your project isn't minutiae. It's basically the point of a build system. It's not as trivial to get them right as you seem

Knowing correct compile commands for your project isn't minutiae. It's basically the point of a build system. It's not as trivial to get them right as you seem to appreciate. You need topological sorting for that. And you need an accurate and detailed model of your build for that. You only need three or four moving parts in your project for that to become hard to maintain manually. Most development automation problems are not simple. Especially if you want to be portable and readable. It seems really easy when you start but then you need to do debug builds, incorporate sanitizers, generate a little protobuf, link against libclang, run a linter, respect pkg-config, support install ands, or any of a number of other things. These aren't especially academic or esoteric use cases. They're reasonable things to do in a C or C++ project.