Good article, I got so annoyed with all the churn in build tools for client side I eschewed them all and just use Python with Envoy to run them as command line tools.

NPM brings in the packages and I use browserify for handling require but again from the cli not via grunt/gulp

It gives me near endless flexibility, the python code is often clearer and I can pull in just about anything I need if I need it.

    ./front.py js --debug
    ./front.py css --debug
    ./front.py deploy

I also like that the python code to handle tasks is largely self-documenting if you know python.

Since they are just python files I can setup filewatchers in intellij and call them when something changes giving me a high degree of automation.