[akst]

In my experience all non-trivial frontend project I've worked on have ended up with some kind of build step (minification, linting, concating, ect), with or without a compile2JS language.

This isn't an issue for node projects as you can simply `require` the `coffee-script/register` module and node handles coffee scripts for you via normal `requires`.

[Touche]

You don't actually need a build step for either in development. Any client-side loader can compile your CS code on the fly.