I do too.. and have similar opinions. I wrote my own tool years back for pipelines because it was always frustrating (started roughly around the same time as N

I do too.. and have similar opinions. I wrote my own tool years back for pipelines because it was always frustrating (started roughly around the same time as Nextflow). Allowing for files to be marked as transient (temp) and re-running from arbitrary time points are definitely one of the things I support... as is conditional logic within the pipeline for job definition and resource usage. For me though, one of the biggest things is that I like having composable pipelines, so each part of the larger workflow can be developed independently. They can interact with each other (DAG) and use existing dependencies, but they don't have to exist in the same document/script. I work on large WGS datasets, so 1000's of jobs per patient isn't uncommon. Happy to talk more if you're interested. https://github.com/compgen-io/cgpipe https://github.com/compgen-io/cgpipe And yes, you can dry run the entire thing. It will write out a bash script if you want to see exactly what is going to run without submitting jobs. It's a full language for pipelines, but heavily inspired by Makefiles (with conditional logic).