I use it in a similar way except make is a gateway to clj

how would you run something say clean, just implement that in clojure

yes

with lumo, or just plain old fs interop?

I have no idea what lumo is

the lumo question makes no sense to me whatsoever in this context, because lumo is a clojurescript runtime, so why would I advocate for getting rid of shell tasks around clj only to shell out to node?

the best thing you can do for any build process is keep node and javascript as far away from it as possible

I think an example would be great, I wasn't trying to guess your methodology, just didn't have enough information on your process

you have a target in a makefile like

foo:
  X
  Y
  clj -A:whaterver some.namespace
  Z

instead write a clojure namespace like

(ns my.build)

(defn -main [& args]
  (x)
  (y)
  (some.namespace/-main)
  (z))

instead of doing make foo do clj -A:whatever my.build

make is great, but as a tool is largely about generating multiple artifacts and tracking dependencies between them, which is not something that is done in builds for most clojure projects.

a good use of make would be for writing a rule for generating a class file from a given source file or something, but that doesn't match the compilation model

Right, I kind of thought about it earlier when doing it, since you have to create .PHONY targets that usi g it as a simple alias system isn't the best. But I have targets that run docker containers with certain params, and do other things which are readily available in bash so I went with that

I only mentioned lumo because some I've heard use it for shell scripting in js

I think for many that Target the web would already have mode on the environment so they use for that

Do you just use https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.java.shell/sh for host commands?

For building the clojure part of our project we use leiningen but there's also other stuff and we use make to orchestrate the whole build. E.g. running npm build, building end-user docs, deploying artifacts to s3