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Comment by dpe82 | Hacker News Reader

Google's build system Bazel is what you describe.

I should really give it another look, I usually ended up not adopting it for projects because of the boilerplate and high setup overheard, but those are both things that ai agents can usually be trusted with. Maybe the calculus has changed.

Yeah Bazel is a PITA to do yourself. I haven't tried but I'm confident Claude et al. would handle it just fine. By similar logic I recently adopted NixOS for a lot of my servers; Claude is perfectly happy to slog through the pain of Nix configs for me.

I’m not a fan of generative AI for the use case because it’s rote enough to do deterministically, but deterministic code generation is getting better and better.

Gazelle, the BUILD file generator for Go, now supports plugins and several other languages have Gazelle plugins.

I’ve used AI to generate BUILD file generators before, though. I had good luck getting it to write a script that would analyze a Java project with circular dependencies and aggregate the cycle participants into a single target.

It’s gotten easier of late because Bazel modules are nice and Gazelle has started support plugins so it can do build file generation for other languages.

I don’t like generative AI for rote tasks like this, but I’ve had good luck using generative AI to write deterministic code generators that I can commit to a project and reuse.

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