Many responses suggesting a simple bash script instead. One reason I like make is that I can just tab-autocomplete targets. No extra setup needed.

If you’re using a single entry point script (e.g. do.sh) and handling $1 you don’t get that for free.

And the moment you need to make your entry point script aware of “B requires A” then you’re going to half-bake something similar to make, anyway.

Here’s [1] my ~80 line version for Python projects (micromamba + uv) which I’ve been pretty happy with.

[1] https://github.com/giovannipcarvalho/micromamba.mk