Back to the Monolith: AI Cost, Context, and our Changing Priorities
Most of Shepherd's architecture existed to compensate for our coordination limits, but AI-driven development removed that need to compensate. We merged our polyrepo into a monorepo, collapsed it into a single Next.js monolith, and cut our development cycle from nearly an hour to under 10 minutes.

Eli Kirmayer
Software Engineer
July 30, 2026