Read the build output
Published: · 1 min read
A site I owned shipped a 3.7 MB JPEG to every browser that did not support WebP. It had been doing that for months. Nothing was broken, no alert fired, the Lighthouse score on my laptop was fine.
The build log had been saying so the entire time:
dist/image.jpg 3774113 bytes
Why nobody looks
Build output scrolls past at the end of a command you ran to get to the next thing. It is the least interesting moment of the loop — the work is done, the tests passed, you are already writing the commit message.
But it is the only place where the artifact you actually ship is described honestly. Everything before it is intent. The log is the outcome.
A cheap habit
After a build that matters, spend thirty seconds on:
- Total output size, and the largest single file in it.
- Route count — did something generate pages you didn’t expect?
- Warnings you have learned to scroll past. Those are the ones.
None of this requires tooling. It requires reading the thing your computer already printed for you.