> What you really want is a way for scripts to describe their dependencies, and then the runner figures out what order to run them in, and cache scripts that don't need to be run because their inputs didn't change.
DAG + content-addressing, final binary being the target and everything resolved from there. We could have some beautiful build system that just works and is fast, but seems it never magically appears by itself although it seems so elegant. Guess Nix/NixOS is the closest we've gotten so far, works well enough, missing concurrency and parallelism though.
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.
Could you clarify what you mean about Nix missing concurrency and parallelism? I often run builds using nix-output-monitor and it definitely looks like things are running in parallel, although I could be mistaken.
Wireit does both DAG and content-addressing. It figerprints the inputs and outputs of dependencies. And you run scripts externally with plain `npm run` commands. It's really beautiful.