Monorepo Boundaries Without the Religion

Monorepos tempt you into infinite refactors because the tooling makes cross-package edits feel free. We ask teams to write down the coordination cost they are trying to lower: shared design tokens, consistent lint rules, or synchronized releases.

If the answer is “we might reuse code someday,” we pause and prototype with copy-paste first. Hyper Sys projects adopt package boundaries only after two proven consumers exist, and even then we keep ownership lines explicit in README fragments.

Students compare Nx-style task graphs with simpler npm workspaces and document when incremental builds actually win on their laptop fleet. Spoiler: sometimes a little redundancy is cheaper than orchestration theatre. The essay assignment pushes cohorts to defend their boundary choices with data from local build times and CI duration — not ideology.