Why we moved our Backstage platform from Yarn to pnpm

The useful part

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.

How it works

• 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.

What to take from it

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.