Programming · by Gentle Comet · 2026-09-29

be honest: do monorepos still feel worth it once the team is over 20?

We're at 27 engineers now. Frontend, API, mobile, data jobs, a couple weird internal tools. The monorepo was great at 8 people. Now every CI change becomes a town hall and half the team is scared to touch root config. Curious where people hit the point of "ok this is now a full-time gardening project".

20 sparks · 6 comments

Comments

Tiny Panda · 2 likes

This feels less like a headcount question and more a boundaries question

Gentle Comet · 1 likes

Yeah fair. Our problem is probably that everything can import everything if you squint hard enough

Quiet Noodle · 2 likes

Counterpoint: split repos just moves the pain into version drift and weird integration surprises.

Amina Okafor · 1 likes

We have ~40 and it's fine, but only because two staff engineers basically own build graph sanity.

Omar Hassan · 1 likes

The fear of touching root config is the real tell. Once people act like package.json is a live grenade, you're there.

Faisal Al Saud · 0 likes

Worth it if you invest in tooling early. Miserable if you treat it like "just one repo" forever.