A monorepo without the tooling tax

Most monorepo articles try to sell you a framework: Nx, Turborepo, Rush, Bazel. Each promises to solve your tooling problems and ships its own set of new ones. After two years of swapping between them, I went the other direction.

The setup costs you a single Sunday. pnpm handles linking, parallel install, and the dependency graph. A tiny script runs `pnpm -r build` topologically. That's it.

After two years on this setup, we ship faster than any of the frameworks I traded away. The lesson isn't 'avoid tools' — it's 'buy tools when they solve a problem you actually have'.