Monorepos: When They Help and When They Hurt
Shared code and atomic changes are great — until your build graph and CI become the bottleneck.
Monorepos shine when teams share code: one place for types, components, and utilities, and atomic commits across frontend and backend. Refactors that span services become a single reviewable change instead of a coordination nightmare.
The cost is tooling. Without good task caching and affected-graph builds, CI balloons and every developer pays for code they didn't touch. Invest in the build system early or the monorepo turns into a tax.
My rule: monorepo when code is genuinely shared and teams are aligned; separate repos when boundaries are hard and ownership is distinct. Structure should follow the team, not the other way around.
Vivek Jalondhara
Full Stack Software Engineer