AI.JSX (https://github.com/fixie-ai/ai-jsx) is a framework specific to AI App development, but it's built to integrate with React / JS UI development.
So I think the answer to your question is "both". :) To build an AI app, you need many of the same skills you need to build any other type of app. But it's not like AI is some spooky thing that only ML pros can touch. It's accessible to any dev.
Yes, that sounds very much like the scenario we see ourselves in. For us, we have too many projects for copy/pasting the Gruntfile between them to be a viable option, and the Gruntfiles themselves would have been too complex.
I'm not convinced the shell scripts are a good alternative, though. (Maybe they are for your scenario.) I would like to write a follow-up post talking about this.
Yes, I acknowledge in the article that Grunt is not designed for this, and if you use Grunt for what it is designed for, it works pretty well. However, it wasn't obvious to me the using Grunt to build an SDK was outside of its scope when I started the project, so I figured it may not be obvious to other people as well.
maybe not "passion" per se, but the bug is people's willingness to believe things on insufficient evidence because it gives them a sense of purpose or binds them to a bigger group.
My main problem is that it has awful support for functional programming, which I find to be a really helpful way of doing something like a web crawler, where you're essentially describing a computation to parse some input. I would use F#, because it offers powerful functional programming tools, is on .NET / VS 2012 (not sure if that's a pro or con for you), and has type inference (so you get the benefits of static typing without the cost of writing out the types of everything).
You should probably check existing web crawler solutions to see if you can adapt them before rolling your own.
So I think the answer to your question is "both". :) To build an AI app, you need many of the same skills you need to build any other type of app. But it's not like AI is some spooky thing that only ML pros can touch. It's accessible to any dev.