What Git worktrees, parallel coding agents, and a cache pointing at the wrong directory taught us about the assumptions hiding inside node_modules.
I’m a developer at bol, where we have been building and running our internal developer platform on Backstage for more than five years.
After that much time, a Backstage platform becomes more than a collection of plugins. It accumulates its own ways of working: CI conventions, local startup tooling, container images, Git worktree helpers, and shortcuts that make sense inside one engineering organization.
One of our most productive choices has been using Git worktrees for parallel development with coding agents. An agent can fix a bug in one worktree while another handles a small improvement elsewhere, without branches fighting over the same working directory. When several small tasks are moving at once, this can multiply the amount of useful work we finish.
That workflow also made our package manager part of the architecture. We wanted a more forward-looking setup, and pnpm looked like a better fit: a shared content-addressable store, efficient reuse across checkouts, and a dependency layout managed by the package manager itself.
