What is a build for? The article does not really articulate it. * Dependency management (use libs so you dont have to write/maintain that code yourself) * Code

What is a build for? The article does not really articulate it. * Dependency management (use libs so you dont have to write/maintain that code yourself) * Code generation (we use that for added typesafety: jOOQ the SQL eDSL, and OpenAPI3 for generated clients + server-side DTOs) * Compilation (compile higher-level languages with strong type-safety guarantees, e.g. Kotlin, Elm, Haskell, Rust, TypeScript; to lower-level or dyn-typed/quirky languages, e.g. JS, WASM, byte-code, binaries) Three pretty important advantages! Sure builds come with added complexity, so it is a trade off. But when carefully picking technologies this can greatly pay back the cost of complexity. Now, if you compile, say, JS to JS (less to CSS) with brittle build tools such as npm (shell commands in a string in a JSON called packages.json), and low quality dependencies, then the advantage your build step probably negative.