I use Gulp to build all of our frontend dependencies and it's great. Before that I was using Grunt, and it was alright. My only complaint was how unbearably slo

I use Gulp to build all of our frontend dependencies and it's great. Before that I was using Grunt, and it was alright. My only complaint was how unbearably slow it was. It's true that when you're just doing one-off things you probably don't need something like Grunt or Gulp. For doing certain stuff, it's usually a lot easier to call programs directly than trying to call it from Gulp, for example: protractor. What I do is I put all my tasks (some of which are Gulp tasks, others which are just calling the executable directly) inside of the npm scripts section, so you end up with a really nice consistent interface. A lot of people get too caught up in small details when really most people just wanna get their job done. Our build/dev processes are complicated enough that using Gulp alleviates a lot of pains.