[Go Make Things] The real cost of build tools

By rahmat hidayat

Tuesday, December 24, 2024

​ Over the weekend, I got a comment on one of my YouTube videos about buildless testing that was something along the lines of… Every professional project uses build tool. You only need to run npm install once and you're good to go. Do you avoid version control, too? So much to unpack in just three short sentences! I've never said build tools don't have value. They do! I've used them before, and I'll certainly use them again. But I think that value really only kicks in once projects reach a certain size, and for a lot of things that a lot of folks build (including professional projects), going buildless would actually be a better choice. Why? Because you don't "just run npm install once and you're good to go." Build tools require constant maintenance, security updates, patches, and so on. Matthias Ott summarized it well over on BlueSky recently… It happened again: update 6 lines of CSS in an older website project == wrestle with Node, nvm, outdated package versions, Gulp, gulp-uglify, gulp-terser, and other stuff just to deploy this tiny change. All that over-engineered short-term magic is so wildly inefficient in the long term. 😂 Like any complex system, tools have a cost. Sometimes, it's a cost worth paying. But often, that cost outweighs the benefit in the long run. Cheers, Chris ​ Want to share this with others or read it later? View it in a browser.​ ​

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