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Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
Jan 10, 2025 Tags: programming I’m not aware of a perfect1 term for this, so I’m making one up: the Makefile effect2. The Makefile effect boils down to this: Tools of a certain complexity or routine unfamiliarity are not run de novo, but are instead copy-pasted and tweaked from previous known-good examples.
CI/CD configurations like GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD, where users copy their YAML spaghetti from the last working setup and tweak it (often with repeated re-runs) until it works again; Linter and formatter configurations, where a basic set of rules gets copied between projects and strengthened/loosened as needed for local conditions; Build systems themselves, where everything non-trivial begins to resemble the previous build system. Think about CI/CD setups, where users diagnose their copy-pasted CI/CD by doing print-style debugging over the network with a layer of intermediating VM orchestration. Systems that are subject to the Makefile effect are also often ones that enable confusion between code and data (or any kind of in-band signalling more generally), in large part because functional solutions are not always secure ones.
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