grunt-concat-sourcemap

This is depressingly ill-informed. Require.js has an optimizer that does exactly what the author suggests: http://requirejs.org/docs/optimization.html The point is to build your application using AMD, using individual assets in development, and then run the optimizer - which concats and adds a loader - for production. Alternatively, you can even go a step simpler and always use concatenated files, along with a minimal loader like Almond.js[1]. If you do this, you'll probably want to use something that adds source maps for your concatenated file (for easier debugging), but that's easy - you can use grunt-concat-sourcemap[2] or a similar plugin for whatever build system you like. [1]: https://github.com/jrburke/almond [2]: https://github.com/kozy4324/grunt-concat-sourcemap

I'm interested in understanding why you are "ajax[ing] in > 200 source files" in development mode? This provides a pretty poor developer experience IMHO; I've found a much better workflow in setting up a single concatenated unminified bundle for development using grunt-concat-sourcemaps [1] to provide source mappings that Chrome Developer Tools can browse. This gives you the snappy page loads you'd expect with a single script element in the page, and still allows you to debug in your separate source files due to the sourcemappings. The only difference between javascript in development and production should be the minification step. [1] https://github.com/kozy4324/grunt-concat-sourcemap