6. Chores

Recipes build files. Chores are for everything else: clean the tree, run the formatter, deploy, open a picker. They have no gathered inputs, no outputs, and no cache: a chore runs every time you invoke it, by design. Shell commands in a chore body are interactive by default (they get a real TTY), so fzf and friends just work.

chore clean
    rm -rf build .cook

chore fmt
    cargo fmt

Chores take parameters (required, defaulted, or variadic) which bind as shell variables and $<...> placeholders in the body:

chore deploy target host="prod.example.com"
    rsync -a out/ "$<host>:$<target>"

cook deploy /var/www            # host defaults to prod.example.com
cook deploy /var/www staging    # arguments bind positionally, in header order

Chores and recipes depend on each other with the same colon syntax. cook play below builds first, then drops you into the binary:

chore play: build
    ./build/app