I'm not sure about the problem of brittleness caused by buggy scripts you must rely on -- you'd get that in any language. But if the brittleness is caused by sl

I'm not sure about the problem of brittleness caused by buggy scripts you must rely on -- you'd get that in any language. But if the brittleness is caused by slightly different dependencies being installed for each developer or CI machine, I also recommend creating development environment setup and activation scripts that create a reproducible development environment (based on a requirements.txt generated via pip freeze, committed into the repo; or similar). Even if the platforms you depend on don't do this, you can do it yourself. It won't fix their bugs, but it will make the development environment more deterministic. I agree that not all embedded developers should have to work with daily or even monthly. Ideally, all they have to do is run to commands: ./scripts/setup-dev-env source ./scripts/activate-dev-env However, embedded software development heavily relies on invoking build systems, compilers, analyzers and other tools -- calling project-specific programs and scripts. At least one person on each project should be familiar with setting these up for the 1st time, document their usage, and support others.