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For Felipe Oñoro, a no-build-step web app is a way to limit what he may have to maintain alone—not proof that build tools are bad or unnecessary. His current bookmark manager uses vanilla JavaScript in the browser, with PostgreSQL and PostgREST behind it. That keeps the stack lean, but it has also cost him several evenings implementing card reordering by hand.
Why does Oñoro avoid a build step?
Oñoro says he has spent more than 20 years managing IT departments, including the last 17 at the same organization on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. Those are his self-reported career details. In his account, his day job involves infrastructure and operations, while he builds web applications alone on a VPS he administers.
His maintenance concern is personal and long-term: “Every layer I add is a layer I’ll be debugging at 11pm in three years, alone.” A bundler, framework, or other tool can solve real problems, but it also becomes part of the system he may need to understand and repair. His point is not that every project should avoid those tools; it is that a solo maintainer should count their ongoing cost.
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What does his current project use?
In his description of the bookmark manager, the frontend is vanilla JavaScript with no build step, bundler, or framework. The backend is PostgREST in front of PostgreSQL. Oñoro says PostgreSQL row-level security handles multi-tenancy, much of the business logic lives in SQL functions, and Python scripts run background work on cron. He says this setup has no application server of his own.
This is one person’s architecture, not a universal recipe. It reflects a particular choice about where to put application behavior: browser code for the interface, database functions for much of the business logic, and scheduled scripts for background tasks.
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What does the no-build approach cost?
It does not eliminate implementation work. Oñoro says a framework’s drag-and-drop functionality would have saved him time: he spent several evenings implementing the reordering of cards across topic columns by hand. That is a concrete tradeoff in his project, not a measured comparison of frameworks against no-build development.
The practical question is what kind of work matters most for a given app. Avoiding a toolchain may reduce the number of dependencies and systems to maintain, while implementing a feature yourself can take longer than using a framework capability. The essay gives no quantified totals for either ongoing maintenance or feature-development time.
How to decide whether this fits your project
Before choosing a no-build approach, consider the demands of the application and the person or team who will own it over time. These questions help distinguish a deliberately small stack from one that would make the work harder:
- How interactive is the interface? A mostly straightforward application may not need a framework’s richer interaction model. Complex interactions can make framework features valuable.
- How much structure repeats? Repeated page or component patterns may be easier to manage with a framework, though that adds a tool and its conventions.
- Who maintains the toolchain? Include the people responsible for dependencies, build configuration, and upgrades—not just the initial setup.
- What feature work would a framework save? Compare that likely benefit with the additional layers it introduces, rather than assuming one approach is always faster.
These are decision questions, not conclusions tested by Oñoro’s account. His example shows why a solo developer might prefer fewer moving parts and also why that preference can require more hands-on feature work.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the example does—and does not—show
Oñoro’s essay, published August 30, 2026, offers a first-person account of one engineer’s operating preference and one project’s architecture. It does not establish that build tools generally harm maintainability, that no-build projects are easier to operate, or that other developers will save time by following the same approach. Its value is the explicit tradeoff: fewer layers to own may be worth accepting extra implementation effort when one person expects to maintain the project for years.
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