Going along with the firearm analogy, it's only fully useful and powerful tool once you've removed it from its case and removed the trigger lock. Any given fire

Going along with the firearm analogy, it's only fully useful and powerful tool once you've removed it from its case and removed the trigger lock. Any given firearm may have additional safety features such as interlocks, but they're only effective if they stay out of the way when you intend to shoot. You avoid accidentally shooting yourself and others through training, practice and discipline: treat any firearm as if it were loaded, keep your finger off the trigger until you intend to shoot, etc. When setting up a build system for multiple people to use, it's important to agree on a general approach and some rules to follow in order to keep the system from turning into a mess. It's code like anything else, and benefits from training, practice and discipline. Using a language that most folk already know is almost always better than using an obscure one out of a sense that the obscurity makes it safer. When building up a build system, I suggest focusing on designing abstractions to make 90% of use cases trivial for other developers to use. Spitting out libraries and linking them into binaries, existing autocoding scripts, etc. The other 10% of cases that other folk run into, loudly volunteer to make yourself available to help them work through it. Most of the time, there's a way to do what they need that isn't horrendous, or you can take the opportunity to improve your abstractions. If your problem is that other developers you work with just go in with a hatchet and make a mess without informing anyone, perhaps it's time to adobt some processes to address that, such as better version control hygiene and code reviews.