frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Show HN: Home Maker: Declare Your Dev Tools in a Makefile

https://thottingal.in/blog/2026/03/29/home-maker/
24•sthottingal•4d ago
A developer's machine accumulates tools fast. A Rust CLI you compiled last year, a Python formatter installed via `uv`, a language server pulled from npm, a terminal emulator from a curl script, a Go binary built from source. Each came from a different package manager, each with its own install incantation you half-remember.

I wanted a way to declare what I need without adopting a complex system like Nix or Ansible just for a single laptop. The result was a plain old Makefile.

I wrote a short post on using Make (along with a tiny bash script and fzf) to create a searchable, single-command registry for all your local dev tools. It’s not a new framework or a heavy tool—just a simple way to organize the package managers we already use.

If you're tired of losing track of your local environment, you might find it useful.

Comments

ekropotin•1h ago
I think you are re-inventing the wheel https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager
Arthurian•1h ago
I recently used clause code to help me learn nix + home-manager! For anyone considering it - it’s been fun, genuinely useful in my day to day, and I can’t recommend it enough - I now have a source controlled tool kit that I can take with me anywhere I go
ika•54m ago
I agree. I started with Nix flakes in my project and fell in love with them. Then I started using Home Manager, and now I feel complete. I even played with nix-darwin and NixOS. It's an amazing piece of software.
theowaway213456•1h ago
Five years ago, I would've loved this. I love the simplicity and power of good old Make. And I obsess over my workstation's configuration. I used to have a massive bash script I would use to reprovision my workstation after every clean upgrade of Ubuntu.

But these days, I just tell codex to install things for me. I basically use it as a universal package manager. It's more reliable honestly than trying to keep up to date with "what's the current recommended way to install this package?"

I also have it keep a list of packages I have installed, which is synced to GitHub every time the list changes.

nemosaltat•1h ago
Just add the universal install script to AGENTS.md and yolo https://xkcd.com/1654/
tpoacher•1h ago
Add the LLM to your makefile then :p

  target:
      llm command "Install X for me."
(PS. I don't even know if I'm joking anymore)
esafak•1h ago
you can declare tools and tasks with http://mise.jdx.dev/
bargainbin•1h ago
If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend Mise. It manages everything at the user level so it’s not as “all encompassing” as Nix and is readily compatible with immutable distros.

https://mise.jdx.dev/

Your solution is akin to putting your dotfiles in the code repo, which is going to cause issues with languages with poor version compatibility (such as node and python) when switching between old projects.

Also, bold of you to assume developers know make and bash just because they’re using Linux!

igor47•39m ago
I cannot endorse mise more highly. I commit it to my repos to make sure every engineer has the same environment. I use it in CI for consistency there as well. I keep all commands that would normally be documented in a readme as mise tasks. I use mise to load the environment, independent of language specific tools like dotenv. I use a gitignored mise.local to put real creds into the environment for testing.
ManuelKiessling•22m ago
These days, all dev tooling of my projects lives behind mise tasks, and the runtime for my projects is Docker.

This means that getting a project in shape for development on a new system looks like this:

- clone project

- `mise run setup`

I have zero dev tools on my host, projects are 100% self-contained.

Pure bliss.

See https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp for an example.

tpoacher•25m ago
I have something somewhat similar here: https://git.sr.ht/~tpapastylianou/misc-updater

The main difference is I initially only needed a mechanism to check if my "Manually-Installed or Source -Compiled" (MISC) packages have updates, but now it also supports install/upgrading too.

In other words, things I am forced to do by hand outside of a package manager, I now only do by hand once, save it as an 'install' script, and then incorporate it into this system for future use and to check for updates. Pretty happy with it.

tmarice•3m ago
I’ve been using devenv.sh for the last year for this, and never been happier.

Show HN: Home Maker: Declare Your Dev Tools in a Makefile

https://thottingal.in/blog/2026/03/29/home-maker/
24•sthottingal•4d ago•12 comments

Show HN: Made a little Artemis II tracker

https://artemis-ii-tracker.com/
75•codingmoh•7h ago•29 comments

Show HN: A P2P messenger with dual network modes (Fast and Tor)

https://github.com/Realman78/Kiyeovo/
33•Realman78•14h ago•18 comments

Show HN: Minimal Brain Teaser Web Game (Handcrafted, No AI)

https://mehuleo.github.io/encircle/
3•arttaboi•2h ago•0 comments

Show HN: SyNumpy – a Header only C++17 library for working with NumPy Arrays

https://github.com/symisc/sy-numpy-cpp
17•symisc_devel•11h ago•2 comments

Show HN: I built a DNS resolver from scratch in Rust – no DNS libraries

https://github.com/razvandimescu/numa
92•rdme•20h ago•53 comments

Show HN: Dull – Instagram Without Reels, YouTube Without Shorts (iOS)

https://getdull.app
141•kasparnoor•1d ago•110 comments

Show HN: A Minimal Basic Inspired by Brainfuck

https://coe.psu.ac.th/ad/minBASIC/
5•ADavison2560•5h ago•0 comments

Show HN: I tested 15 free AI models at building real software on a $25/year VPS

https://georgelarson.me/writing/2026-04-03-25-dollar-ai-lab/
19•j0rg3•13h ago•3 comments

Show HN: CLI to order groceries via reverse-engineered REWE API (Haskell)

https://github.com/yannick-cw/korb
197•wazHFsRy•3d ago•81 comments

Show HN: Git bayesect – Bayesian Git bisection for non-deterministic bugs

https://github.com/hauntsaninja/git_bayesect
329•hauntsaninja•5d ago•43 comments

Show HN: SkiFlee (an HTML5 game)

https://easel.games/@raysplaceinspace/skiflee
6•BSTRhino•6h ago•5 comments

Show HN: Zerobox – Sandbox any command with file, network, credential controls

https://github.com/afshinm/zerobox
136•afshinmeh•3d ago•90 comments

Show HN: Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search

https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearch
197•tjgreen•2d ago•56 comments

Show HN: Forkrun – NUMA-aware shell parallelizer (50×–400× faster than parallel)

https://github.com/jkool702/forkrun
149•jkool702•6d ago•41 comments

Show HN: 1-Bit Bonsai, the First Commercially Viable 1-Bit LLMs

https://prismml.com/
417•PrismML•2d ago•153 comments

Show HN: I built an offline and privacy-first photo sorter

https://photosort-production-d4d1.up.railway.app/
3•Sensotix•9h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Abject: the first self-aware object runtime

https://blog.mempko.com/an-abject-horror/
8•mempko•17h ago•2 comments

Show HN: RiceVM – A Dis virtual machine and Limbo compiler in Rust

4•habedi0•10h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Flight-Viz – 10K flights on a 3D globe in 3.5MB of Rust+WASM

https://flight-viz.com
82•coolwulf•1d ago•45 comments

Show HN: Most products have no idea what their AI agents did yesterday

https://velt.dev/activity-logs
3•rakeshgoyal•11h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Real-time dashboard for Claude Code agent teams

https://github.com/simple10/agents-observe
73•simple10•1d ago•24 comments

Show HN: Claude Code rewritten as a bash script

https://github.com/jdcodes1/claude-sh
52•rpst•2d ago•16 comments

Show HN: Mac-hardware toys, control your Mac's hardware like a modular synth

https://github.com/pirate/mac-hardware-toys
2•nikisweeting•12h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Portcullis, a review gate for curl|bash

https://github.com/imjasonh/portcullis
5•ImJasonH•13h ago•1 comments

Show HN: We open-sourced our content writing workflow as a Claude Code skill

https://www.npmjs.com/package/claude-content-writer
16•arximughal•1d ago•7 comments

Show HN: Semantic atlas of 188 constitutions in 3D (30k articles, embeddings)

https://constitutionalmap.ai/en
10•joaoli131•1d ago•3 comments

Show HN: Coasts – Containerized Hosts for Agents

https://github.com/coast-guard/coasts
97•jsunderland323•3d ago•39 comments

Show HN: NASA Artemis II Mission Timeline Tracker

https://www.sunnywingsvirtual.com/artemis2/timeline.html
91•AustinDev•1d ago•16 comments

Show HN: AI-first PostgreSQL client for Mac

https://guillim.github.io/products/paul
4•Guillim•14h ago•0 comments