My new favorite way to completely underuse a Makefile? Creating personalized, per-project repository workflow command aliases that you can check in.
To do all this with a Makefile (GNU make), we use Makefile rules and recipes.
Here are some examples of things we can make easier (sorry): Now we have some command-line aliases that you can check-in!
Naturally, you need a help command: With a little command-line magic, this egrep command takes the output of MAKEFILE_LIST, sorts it, and uses awk to find strings that follow the ## pattern.