Going Buildless

The new buzzword on the development block is “buildless“. First we got rid of servers. Now builds. Whatever next!

Brad Frost talks about raw dogging websites (be careful what you search for there…)

No frameworks, no CMSes, no build steps, no nuthin’. Sure, you can call it a static site, but even those tend to be compiled by sophisticated tooling behind the scenes

And that’s how we rolled, a decade or more ago. And we probably can and should for a lot of sites. But for large complex code bases, large probably distributed teams, perhaps multiple teams how realistic is that? Max Böck asks

So, how far are we away from actually working without builds in HTML, CSS and Javascript? The idea of “buildless” development isn’t new – but there have been some recent improvements that might get us closer. Let’s jump in.

and concludes

So, can we all ditch our build tools soon?

Probably not. I’d say for production-grade development, we’re not quite there yet. Performance tradeoffs are a big part of it, but there are lots of other small problems that you’d likely run into pretty soon once you hit a certain level of complexity.

For smaller sites or side projects though, I can imagine going the buildless route – just to see how far I can take it.

Funnily enough, many build tools advertise their superior “Developer Experience” (DX). For my money, there’s no better DX than shipping code straight to the browser and not having to worry about some cryptic node_modules error in between.

I’d love to see a future where we get that simplicity back.