I am a full stack developer and spend a fair bit of time on the front end. Like you I feel a lot of this work will be made obsolete very soon but I am resigned

I am a full stack developer and spend a fair bit of time on the front end. Like you I feel a lot of this work will be made obsolete very soon but I am resigned to the fact because it has been going on like this for years. I find the best strategy is to wait for wider adoption and hedge your bets. Gulp looks great but depending on the amount of time you can spend on it, it's best to wait for the ecosystem to mature (more plugins, more framework support, migration of existing Grunt plugins etc). I would give it another year or so because community migration can take time (backward compatibility, dependencies, endowment effect, etc). The other thing that works for me is to adopt frameworks with a lower learning curve even it requires more manual plumbing. Plumbing is cheap and you can always refactor. Backbone JS was easy and I am looking forward to Riot JS because it has no learning curve as long as you have a good familiarity with writing robust JS.