> Refactoring across repository boundaries requires much more activation energy as compared to spotting and performing gradual refactorings across folder bounda

> Refactoring across repository boundaries requires much more activation energy as compared to spotting and performing gradual refactorings across folder boundaries. Technically it is the same, but the psychological barriers are different. I love the "activation energy" metaphor here. But I don't agree that "technically it is the same." At my current job, we have more than 100 minirepos and I am unable to confidently refactor the system like I normally would in a monorepo. It's not merely the psychological barrier. It's that I am unable to find all the call sites of any "published" function. Minirepos create too many "published" functions in the form of Nuget packages. Microservices create too many "published" functions in the form of API endpoints. In either case, "Find All References" no longer works; you have to grep, but most names are not unique enough. For this reason, the kind of refactoring that keeps a codebase healthy happens at a much lower rate than all the other projects I've worked on.