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This is great! Toolchain pain really sucks, and makes being able to get started on a project harder for many, when all you want to do is get a setup running and start creating app code. Having an opinionated CLI start up a scaffold is great - one can also peel apart this whenever one has to prepare for modifying the build chain for specific purposes (for example using Rollup to optimize bundled code, adding new build steps, etc.).

The only thing I disagree with here is not allowing it to be pluggable - IMO it should be flexible and allow users to tweak the setup as desired. Of course, it should focus on getting the core experience right, but in the long term I absolutely think it would be better to have a pluggable CLI.




Toolchain pain is closely related to configurability i.e. "having a pluggable API".

Your choices for this type of tool are zero configuration with no pain, or configurability with pain.

You can't have it both ways. In the JavaScript world, configuration and pain are synonyms.


> In the JavaScript world, configuration and pain are synonyms.

This is outright false. There is some relation, but not all configuration results in pain.


It's a good enough slogan.... if more developers took it to heart then JavaScript development would not be the torturous process it is today.

Any time anyone thinks about adding a configuration option they should think again and if humanly possible, take the configuration option out.

Developers love making things configurable - it's a way of avoiding tough decisions about what software should and should not be able to do.

The best developers are constantly looking for opportunities to remove configurability without compromising the goals of their software.


If it's wrong, it's not good enough.

I don't disagree that configuration is awful, especially if it isn't well thought out, but some configuration is unavoidable & even preferable in some situations (for example when dealing with differences between production, qa, and dev environments). Dismissing configuration wholesale though is laziness. All things should be considered carefully, and blanket statements serve little good.




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