I’m not going to try to convince anyone today of whether monorepos are a good or bad idea. Instead, I want to focus on the underappreciated and fundamental fact that a monorepo is not a monorepo is not a monorepo.

Last year’s explosion of agentic concepts was dizzying: MCP, AGENTS.md, skills, subagents, hooks, plugins, specs… we’re all running so fast to keep up, it’s easy to miss that we’re on someone else’s treadmill: the coding agent.

I tried coding in English. It was fun attempting to build real software with nothing but natural language and the primitives of a CLI agent. I learned a lot, but I also hit some walls.