[basicallybones]

NX is a double-bladed lightsaber. I love it when it is working. The problem (and I say this with appreciation for the difficulty of the task) is there are too many bugs. Bugs in your monorepo tooling are scary and dangerous, especially for young or lower-maturity shops without very comprehensive QA.

A few months ago, I managed to get all the way to final production artifact verification on an iOS app after a casual NX upgrade and multiple major monorepo-level commits to discover that the "fileReplacements" configuration for the application environment variables had stopped working. Boy did that ever stress me out, because that would be a disaster to release, and it is so low in the tooling stack that you can be lulled into expecting that sort of thing to just...work because the team supporting it understands the consequences of a breakage in that sort of functionality. This is the type of bug that results in incidents that developers write their "it-finally-happened-to-us" blog posts about. I mention this because it was a particularly memorable incident for me, but there have been other bugs that were less dangerous and more just unpleasant, but any failure to properly compute affected packages in a production build could get very gross. This feels like a memory, but it might just be a fear.

I still voluntarily keep NX and like a lot of things about it. The engineers seem to care a lot and have made some impressive features. But I stay on my toes, and my attitude has shifted away from excitement about the latest-and-greatest to a focus on keeping my options open and minimizing lock-in.

It feels like the NX decision-makers are trying to do much, too quickly. They are building and releasing with notable speed. How many production releases are there for each NextJS production release? And NX is at a lower level of the tooling stack, with a far broader range of integrations. I state that merely as an off-the-cuff anecdotal observation, not as some greater opinion on release cadence. But this does feel like "a more releases, more bugs, wrong area of the tech stack for that" type of situation.