Another way to think about it is if you were to deliver the application to someone else. They shouldn't need Grunt to run your app. Providing an easy way to run

Another way to think about it is if you were to deliver the application to someone else. They shouldn't need Grunt to run your app. Providing an easy way to run the app with npm start is nice to have. Maybe add the npm install part to the process so they can just run one command to do two things. Going further you could set environment variables so production and development variables can be enabled easily. Just like you I'm still fairly new to the node way of doing things and just do whatever makes sense to me.