What's the slowest part of your dev loop?

I asked myself this while building NitroIDE, and the honest answer wasn't my typing speed, my bundler, or my machine. It was the wait between change and result — the dead seconds after hitting save and before seeing what happened.

Every dev loop is the same cycle: edit → wait → see → judge → repeat. Most of us optimized the EDIT step. I finally timed the WAIT step, and it turned out the wait WAS the loop: ~2–5 seconds per iteration, × 200 iterations a day, = 15+ minutes of pure staring, every day.

The fix wasn't a faster bundler — it was removing the trip entirely. NitroIDE's preview renders in the same browser tab with no build and no network hop (srcdoc + postMessage), so the wait went from seconds to effectively zero. The loop got 10x shorter without typing any faster.

Before you optimize your toolchain, time your loop. The bottleneck might be the gap between your tools.

What's the slowest part of YOUR dev loop? Curious what everyone hits first.

Try it here: https://nitroide.com/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=daily-2026-09-28