Monorepos Are Overrated (For Most Teams)
## The Monorepo Hype
Every week, another team announces they are moving to a monorepo. Turborepo this, Nx that. The tooling is incredible.
But here is the thing: **you probably do not need it**.
### When Monorepos Make Sense
- Large teams (50+ engineers)
- Shared libraries with frequent changes
- Tight coupling between services
- Google, Microsoft, Meta scale
### When They Do Not
- Small teams (< 20 engineers)
- Microservices with stable interfaces
- Different deployment cadences
- Different tech stacks
### The Hidden Costs
1. **CI complexity** - Everyone waits for everyone else
2. **Tooling investment** - Turborepo is great, but it is not free
3. **Cognitive load** - 500 packages in one repo is overwhelming
4. **Permissions** - Good luck with fine-grained access control
### The Alternative
Polyrepo with good practices:
- Semantic versioning
- Automated dependency updates
- Contract testing
- Clear API boundaries
Simpler. Faster. Good enough for 90% of teams.