Have you checked out Hugo? It's builds are pretty fast, and it has a watch function for rapid dev work. Not sure how you'd get away from a build on updates tho

Have you checked out Hugo? It's builds are pretty fast, and it has a watch function for rapid dev work. Not sure how you'd get away from a build on updates though, it is called a static site __generator_. If you want to skip the build entirely, just write .html files and call it a day.