Makefiles are great, and every tool that set out to replace them started by asking you to stop using one. That is the tell. make is fifty years old, sits on every machine, and hands a stranger exactly one thing to type. Whatever is wrong here, it is not make.

It is the shell inside it. A recipe is a string handed to bash, so your build logic is stringly-typed and OS-specific, and your prose gets parsed as code. Ours once took a commit message reading fix(cli): tidy up, handed it to bash, and bash did what bash does with a parenthesis. It committed half the sentence and pushed it.

bmk is a build, test and release runner for Python projects. It keeps the Makefile and throws out the bash. You still type make test; bmk reads your pyproject.toml, provisions your venv with uv, and runs the gates. Every command is cross-OS Python with no shell anywhere, so the same make test runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. We deleted all 78 of our own .sh and .ps1 files rather than keep two of everything.

uvx bmk install    # drops the Makefile in; installs nothing permanent
make test          # from here on, just make

Requires uv (there is no pip fallback) and Python 3.10+.

• One Makefile, versioned, that updates itself. Every project gets the same template, and it regenerates when bmk updates, so your repos cannot drift apart.
• No shell, anywhere. Every command is cross-OS Python, and every stage is an argv list rather than a shell string. Nothing gets handed to bash to re-parse, including your own stages and your commit messages.
• Your dependencies and bmk's never mix. bmk installs once per machine and holds its own toolchain and nothing of yours. Your packages live in the project's .venv, and that is the environment your tests, type-checker and audit all run against - the same one, so they cannot disagree.
• Staged pipelines, parallel where it is safe. Stages run in order; stages sharing an order run together. Extend any pipeline from your pyproject.toml: add, remove or replace stages in TOML.
• Quiet until it matters. JSON by default: tool output is captured and shown only when a stage fails, otherwise you get one summary line. Pass --human when you want the noise.
• Batteries included. Formatting and linting, type-checking, security and vulnerability audits, import-contract checks, tests with coverage, shell and PowerShell linting, version bumping, tagging, GitHub releases (CI publishes to PyPI), and Codecov upload.

MIT - see LICENSE.