The Four Horsemen

Every build tool thinks it's the chosen one that'll finally solve dependency management and compilation speed. Meanwhile, developers just want their code to compile without sacrificing their firstborn to the build gods.

npm is the chaotic veteran that somehow works despite having 47 nested node_modules folders. Gradle is the enterprise beast that takes 10 minutes to build "Hello World" but promises incremental builds (lies). CMake is the ancient demon speaking in tongues that C++ devs reluctantly worship because there's literally no better alternative.

And then there's the fourth one with its tongue out, probably representing whatever cursed build system your company decided to write in-house because "we have unique requirements." Spoiler: you don't.