[wuliwong]

"Replacing Rails" seems silly. You can enable the asset pipeline in development if you really want. But most people would rather deal with slower page loads in development rather than debugging minified/uglified javascript in the console.

[mbell]

It's not an either / or option. Yeoman handles serving unminified files during dev just fine and compiles / concatenates them for production. You can do everything the rails asset pipeline does and more with grunt. Yeoman comes with a default configuration to do just that. http://yeoman.io/

For dev / early testing I've just been using yeoman + grunt-connect-proxy with grunt spitting the final build files into the rails public directory to make it easy to push up to heroku. In final production you'd probably want to send your static assets to a cdn but that is easy enough.