Do you combine and minify your code? If so, how—presumably a command-line tool? It's totally fine to say that you'd prefer to keep your dependencies fairly mini

Do you combine and minify your code? If so, how—presumably a command-line tool? It's totally fine to say that you'd prefer to keep your dependencies fairly minimal, but pinning that on whether you use a CLI or not seems a false dichotomy from here. The question is how much tooling and what it does for you, versus what it gives you. There is no doubt a real tradeoff there; there are costs to something like Ember CLI and there's no reason everyone should think those costs are worth embracing in every instance. But to be sure, there are upsides: being able to write ES2015, being able to pull in tests automatically, being able to run your entire test suite against the entire app without needing to write any glue to do that yourself... those things do have value, even if they're not particularly appealing to you. And all of those quite comfortably use the official specs to get that work done.