diff --git a/.cargo/config b/.cargo/config
index 35049cbc..b2f50a3e 100644
--- a/.cargo/config
+++ b/.cargo/config
@@ -1,2 +1,8 @@
 [alias]
-xtask = "run --package xtask --"
+# Building the xtask package in release mode is normally not necessary, but if
+# you're going to compile other plugins in release mode then you'd need to
+# recompile serde(-derive) because the xtask packages needs serde to parse the
+# `bundler.toml` config file. To avoid needing to compile these expensive crates
+# twice, we'll default to also running the xtask target in release mode.
+xtask = "run --package xtask --release --"
+xtask-debug = "run --package xtask --"