Generate a Project Makefile for All Your Common Commands
A good Makefile turns docker-compose up -d && php artisan migrate && npm run dev into just make dev. Claude can write one for you from scratch in seconds.
Describe your project and what you want targets for:
Write a Makefile for a Laravel + Vue project that uses Docker Compose.
I want targets for: starting/stopping the stack, running migrations,
running tests (PHP and JS), building frontend assets, clearing caches,
and generating IDE helper files. Add a help target that lists all commands.
Claude will write a proper Makefile with .PHONY declarations, coloured help output, and sensible defaults — not a toy script.
.PHONY: help dev stop test migrate
help: ## Show available commands
@grep -E '^[a-zA-Z_-]+:.*?## .*$$' $(MAKEFILE_LIST) | \
awk 'BEGIN {FS = ":.*?## "}; {printf "\033[36m%-20s\033[0m %s\n", $$1, $$2}'
dev: ## Start the development stack
docker-compose up -d
php artisan migrate --force
test: ## Run the full test suite
./vendor/bin/pest
npm run test
If you have an existing Makefile and want to extend it, paste it in and ask Claude to add new targets without breaking what's already there.
A Makefile is the cheapest onboarding doc you'll ever write — make help tells a new developer everything they need to get started.
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Set up Claude Code as an automated reviewer in your CI pipeline — on every pull request, it reads the diff, checks for bugs, security issues, missing tests, and convention violations, then posts its findings as a PR comment. Your human reviewers get a head start because the obvious issues are already flagged before they look.
Before deploying, tell Claude to read your project — migrations, environment variables, queue workers, scheduled tasks, caching, third-party integrations — and generate a deployment checklist that's specific to your app. Not a generic "did you run migrations?" list, but one that knows YOUR infrastructure and catches the things YOUR deploy can break.
Instead of writing a README from memory or copying a template, tell Claude to read your project and generate one that's actually accurate — real setup instructions from your config, real architecture from your directory structure, real API examples from your routes, and real prerequisites from your dependency files.