I do this a fair amount as well. It's really just a way of documenting the configuration and idiosyncratic commands in one place, which happens to be executable

I do this a fair amount as well. It's really just a way of documenting the configuration and idiosyncratic commands in one place, which happens to be executable. I will happily create (uncommitted) Makefiles with hardcoded paths and keys and things, since otherwise that information would go in my ~/NOTES file and there's too much in there already. My default target tends to echo out things that I told myself I needed to remember when coming back to the project. As soon as I notice I'm reaching for anything more than `.PHONY` targets and dead-simple filename dependencies, I stop and do the real build work in something else (callable via a make target, of course!) I know how to do complicated stuff with make, which means that I know I will do it wrong. Repeatedly. Or possibly eventually do it right, but then have to maintain the resulting fire-breathing hairball. (But to those complaining about not marking all the non-file targets `.PHONY`: lighten up. If the correctness matters so much that you're going to be messed up by a file named `all` or `build` or whatever, you've probably already gone too far down the rabbit hole and should switch to something else.)