Pretty much everything you mention simplifies to "choose a phase, then add an exec plugin declaration". Have you looked at http://maven.apache.org/guides/intro

Pretty much everything you mention simplifies to "choose a phase, then add an exec plugin declaration". Have you looked at http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html#Lifecycle_Reference http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-...? Maven is particularly good at generating code for later compilation and processing. Your custom code generator just needs to put code into src/generated and it will be picked up. Given that Maven is used to organize and build some pretty large projects out there in the real world, you might want to amend your statement from "Maven scales astoundingly poorly" to "I am astoundingly poor at scaling Maven". It's not all wine and roses in the land of Maven, but it gets a whole lot of the job done, and done well.