When I introduced the meta-repo to the team, the goal was a true agentic coding setup: a shared doc set, shared skills, shared rules, all loaded automatically no matter which platform repo you had open. Onboarding got easier and setup went from three commands to one as a side effect of that.
Several months later, that's still true — structuring a codebase for AI context turns out to be a different problem than structuring it for human developers.
This isn't a pattern we roll out on every project. It's what this specific project needed, given a constraint most codebases don't have: three mature repos that couldn't be merged into one.
The setup
The platform I work on has three repos: shared Kotlin Multiplatform code, an iOS presentation layer, an Android presentation layer. They were set up 4–5 years ago, well before AI assistants were part of anyone's toolchain. Three separate git histories, three separate CI pipelines, three sets of conventions. That's just how multi-platform mobile worked on this project — it's not a universal N5 setup, just how this particular client's codebase evolved.
