Gulp is, without a doubt, a 100% improvement over manually compiling your higher-level code into JS/CSS (shudder) or over Grunt (the task runner du-jour that pr

Gulp is, without a doubt, a 100% improvement over manually compiling your higher-level code into JS/CSS (shudder) or over Grunt (the task runner du-jour that preceded it). Anyone just starting out in front-end web development today, though, would be _vastly_ better served by investing time in learning npm scripts [0] rather than learning how to roll their own build pipelines in Gulp. The actual tools that you're orchestrating with Gulp (lessc, webpack, uglify, whatever) pretty much all ship with command-line executables. Why build pipelines in Gulp (or Grunt, or Broccoli, or whatever) using plugins or wrappers when you could just...script the executables directly? That's pretty much what NPM scripts are. Don't learn gulp-webpack-whatever; just...learn webpack. [0]https://css-tricks.com/why-npm-scripts/ https://css-tricks.com/why-npm-scripts/