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 # Developer tool for scientific Python libraries
 
+Developers need to memorize a whole bunch of magic command-line incantations.
+And these incantations change from time to time!
+Typically, their lives are made simpler by a Makefile, but Makefiles can be convoluted, are not written in Python, and are hard to extend.
+The rationale behind `devpy` is therefore to provide a simple interface for common development tasks.
+It comes with a few common build commands out the box, but can easily be customized per project.
+
+As a curiosity: the impetus behind developing the tool was the mass migration of scientific Python libraries (SciPy, scikit-image, and NumPy, etc.) to Meson, after distutils was deprecated.
+When many of the build and installation commands changed, it made sense to abstract away the nuisance of having to re-learn them.
+
 ## Configuration
 
 Settings are in your project's `pyproject.toml`.