thought-machine/please

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2608 stars · 220 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Please is a high-performance, extensible, cross-language build system written in Go, emphasizing hermetic, reproducible builds with aggressive content-hash-based caching and parallel task execution. It supports many languages via plugins and is well suited to large monorepos, offering build, test, and run commands through a single CLI.

Use cases

• build a multi-language monorepo with one tool
• speed up builds with hermetic incremental caching
• find a faster alternative to bazel or buck
• run tests and builds reproducibly in CI
• define custom build rules for any technology
• share a remote build cache across a team

When to choose

• you have a large multi-language monorepo needing fast, reproducible builds
• you want a lightweight, fast-starting alternative to Bazel without JVM startup overhead
• you need hermetic builds with content-hash caching and parallelism
• you want to extend build logic with a purpose-built build language and plugins

When to avoid

• you have a simple single-language project where native tooling (go build, pip, cargo) suffices
• your team already standardizes on Bazel and needs its ecosystem
• you need Windows support, which is not actively supported
• you rely on tooling or integrations specific to another build system

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

build-tool cli testing caching developer-tools developer-tools bsd cli go build-system monorepo reproducible-builds hermetic-builds multi-language bazel-alternative remote-caching command-line devops automation linux macos

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