DEV post proposes a 10-target Makefile as a repo manual for coding agents

On November 3, 2026 at 03:01, DEV Community · AI published an article titled "A Makefile for Coding Agents: 10 Targets Every Repo Should Have", written by the author of the Go book series "Thinking in Go" (a two-volume series spanning "Complete Guide to Go Programming" and "Hexagonal Architecture in Go"), who also maintains Hermes IDE, a project aimed at developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools, and who has written "Database Playbook". The piece argues that a Makefile should serve as a repository's instruction manual for coding agents, listing 10 make targets that every repo should provide before an agent starts work, pinning down commands such as running tests and resetting databases that agents otherwise cannot reliably guess.

The article opens with a concrete observation: hand a coding agent a failing test in a repo it has never seen, and watch where its first turns go. It reads package.json. It reads a README that still mentions a script someone deleted. It opens the CI file to see what actually runs. Then it guesses, and that guess is where things go wrong. To fix this, the author points to Anthropic's Claude Code best practices, noting that when no runnable check exists, a project merely "looking done" is the only signal available. According to the piece, the 10 make targets eliminate this guesswork by codifying the exact commands agents would otherwise have to infer. The article states that this approach can be adopted directly in one's own repository.

As of now, this is the only available report on the subject, so the timeline stops at the publication of this single article without any follow-up developments from other sources.