Nice article, made Grunt seem less intimidating :) I saw that you said

Are they all organized in one place, configured to run automatically when needed, and shared among every single person working on that project? Unlikely, I’d venture.

If all you need is asset pipelining (Jade to HTML, LESS/SASS to CSS, Coffeescript to JS), then HarpJS can be pretty useful.

PS: Forgive my horrible Textile skills, I’m more familiar with Markdown :)