Start small. Pick one domain team. Convert their three related services and libraries into a modrepo. Measure the impact on deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and developer satisfaction. You will likely find that the Goldilocks approach—the modrepo—is exactly what your architecture has been missing. Have you already implemented a modrepo in your organization? Share your experiences and tooling choices in the discussion below.
// package.json at root of modrepo
: Enforce acyclic dependency rules. Use tools like depcruise (JS) or modgraph (Go) to visualize and block dependency cycles. Pitfall 3: Neglecting Developer Experience If every change across three modules in a modrepo requires rebuilding all three from source on every CI run, developers will lose patience. modrepo
| Feature | Monorepo | | Multirepo | |---------|----------|-------------|-----------| | Scope | Entire company codebase | Single bounded context (e.g., team domain) | Per component/service | | Code sharing | Trivial (everything visible) | Controlled via internal packages | Requires package registry | | Build time | Often slow, requires caching | Fast, parallel by design | Usually fast but fragmented | | Access control | Coarse (folder-level) | Fine-grained (repo-level) | Perfect isolation | | Tooling complexity | High (Bazel, Nix, Turborepo) | Medium (standard tools suffice) | Low (but coordination is hard) | | Cross-repo changes | Atomic | Atomic within the modrepo | Requires multiple PRs | Start small