Sitecore #2; CopySauce
As I mentioned before, the project I am currently on is big. REALLY BIG. Building takes 20 seconds or so, and then loading a page after build takes over a minute, leading to very slow iterative cycles.
This was especially infurating for CSS changes, as they were static files anyways, not code!
Complaining bitterly yielded a solution from one of my coworkers, Adam Brauer. He wrote a (slightly outdated) blog post on this issue for the Active Commerce blog. You can find it here
Copysauce is a simple script that you point at your Sitecore folder and your code folder, and you set it up to copy over certain files. Any changes detected on the code-base side (such as .css or .less changes) are copied over to the Sitecore folder, allowing changes to be seen instantly. Fewer builds lead to happier devs!
Configuration is easy - just edit a file called ".CopySauce.json", located in the root of your code folder. You will probably need to add the file to your .gitignore.
Right now, I am using it only for CSS changes, but I imagine it would work just as well for other static files that don't need to be built.