Comment by myrmidon

In my view, the CI system is supposed to run builds and tests in a standardized/reproducible environment (and to store logs/build artifacts).

This is useful because you get a single source of truth for "does that commit break the build" and eliminate implicit dependencies that might make builds work on one machine but not another.

But specifying dependencies between your build targets and/or sourcefiles, is turning that runner into a bad, incomplete reimplementation of make, which is what this post is complaining about AFAICT.