Note: I edited this and turned it into a blog post - read that instead.
While poking around some random projects by the prolific TJ Holowaychuk, I came upon his version of watch, which simply executes a given command periodically.
The idea is to pair it with make to run tests and automatically rebuild/recompile code. Since make tracks dependencies and looks at file modification times, it won't do anything if the relevant source files haven't changed.
There's a program called watch that comes with Linux, but it doesn't play as nicely with make. In particular, it clears the screen every time the command is run. For pairing this with make, we want new output to be printed whenever make actually does anything, and otherwise we want it to be silent.