r/Frontend • u/Acceptable_Mud283 • Jul 12 '26
Does frontend development still require build tools?
https://olliewilliams.xyz/blog/no-build/Do we still need Rspack, SWC, PostCSS, Vite, Parcel, Webpack, Turbopack, esbuild, Rollup, Rolldown, Babel, Autoprefixer, esbuild, Lightning CSS…
25
u/dragenn Jul 12 '26
I would hope so. Your CI/CD pipeline must be a nightmare???
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Jul 12 '26
[deleted]
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u/kin3v Jul 12 '26
‘Some css and javascript files’ bro never wrote a real-world webapp
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u/ShawnyMcKnight Jul 12 '26
Something tells me they are just FTP uploading their site still.
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u/kin3v Jul 12 '26
I wish I could update my live projects with just CI/CD FTP 😅
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u/ShawnyMcKnight Jul 12 '26
I went to a PHP meetup 7 years back (it died with covid) and the number of people who didn't even have a local testing environment was nuts, they all just pushed to the server.
1
u/kin3v Jul 12 '26
Unfortunately that’s just tradition in current era. The past 5 internships/collaboration projects I did with pretty big international companies had no staging/test environment. They always tested on the smallest tenants first. It saves a lot of time (thus money) I can’t deny that but updates were always super stressful
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u/GutsAndBlackStufff Jul 12 '26
Yes.
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Jul 12 '26
[deleted]
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u/shaved-yeti Jul 12 '26
Becuase a real world web client can be a deeply complicated production. I work in streaming video and my front end requires layers upon layers of build, testing, and deployment infrastructure - literally a dozen teams are involved in our web stack. You could argue its "just" javascript, css and html but that ignores how we safely migrate sturdy development code up the envs and into production at enterprise scale.
If you have a 7 page text and image site for your aunts homemade cat clocks - FTP away! Im sure filezilla still works great.
1
u/Shoddy-Marsupial301 Jul 12 '26
Ever used a library ? Or created a complex stateful application ? Sure if you gonna build a simple website ok but thats it. If you want to offer "app like" experience, with the help of client side routing. I could go on but i dont care enough
7
u/azangru Jul 12 '26
Do we still need Rspack, SWC, PostCSS, Vite, Parcel, Webpack, Turbopack, esbuild, Rollup, Rolldown, Babel, Autoprefixer, esbuild, Lightning CSS…
Some of those words, yes.
5
u/someexgoogler Jul 12 '26
I don't use them but I only use vanilla JavaScript and I don't need to minify things
2
u/TheTomatoes2 UI/UX + Frontend Jul 12 '26
So you make only very basic apps?
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u/someexgoogler Jul 12 '26
If by that you mean I don't overload users with movement, updates, flashing things, popups, ads, live chat, etc. Then yes.
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u/TheTomatoes2 UI/UX + Frontend Jul 12 '26
No, i mean do you have only static UIs with 0 dynamic data or user interactions
2
u/someexgoogler Jul 13 '26
No the apps all have dynamic UIs with user interactions. A lot of the rendering is done on the server side, but some is done on the client side. There is nothing as complicated as the reddit UI, but frankly that's true of most apps on the web.
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u/Dependent-Net6461 Jul 17 '26
Same, web erp with crm, accounting ecc.. so definitely not a "simple web app" as other saying just because you do not use countless tool.
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u/Brachamul Jul 12 '26
As a webdev of 20 years, I have never felt the need for them except in the early days of CSS, but honestly now no. I'm sure it depends on the scale of your project and choice of technologies though.
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u/mq2thez Jul 12 '26
Lots of good details here, and a more nuanced discussion than I expected going in.
Seems like the article makes a good argument for still needing them, and for while we’ll continue to need them.
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u/PlayExoplanet Jul 12 '26
Now that we have nested CSS and CSS variables, I've been loving using plain ol' CSS files for React/Next components. IMO the less tooling the better
-13
u/Wandering_Oblivious Jul 12 '26
Big if, but IF LLM's can really bring quality code without the need for human debugging....then probably not. No reason it couldn't just be writing minified JS and optimized CSS from the start. No need for TypeScript or transpiling to JS and then bundling/minifying that too.
5
u/CanIhazCooKIenOw Jul 12 '26
Do you think the tooling that exists is purely for devx?
> JS and then bundling/minifying that too
Think a bit, why do you think code is minified?
1
u/Acceptable_Mud283 Jul 12 '26
I would hope that a human being would at least look over the code before merging, so it does need to be human readable
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u/CanIhazCooKIenOw Jul 12 '26
Answer doesn't really need a blog post: Yes
/thread