Monorepo vs Polyrepo: The Honest Tradeoffs
A pragmatic framework for choosing, with the operational costs nobody talks about.
ER
Elena RossiContributor, The Signal
The monorepo-vs-polyrepo debate generates more heat than light because the answer depends almost entirely on the team's tooling sophistication. Monorepos at small scale are pleasant. Monorepos at medium scale without proper tooling are miserable. Polyrepos at any scale require deliberate dependency hygiene.
The honest framing: pick the architecture you can afford to operate. If you do not have someone willing to own build tooling, polyrepos will hurt you less. If you do, a monorepo with task graphs, remote caching, and selective CI will make your platform team faster than any other single decision.