Building a VS Code extension is fun, but what happens when you want to take that same logic to mobile?

I’ve been working on DotSense, a developer wellness tool. It started as a VS Code extension, but I wanted to expand it to Android using Kotlin & React Native.

The problem? My business logic was tightly coupled to the VS Code API. I couldn’t just "copy-paste" it to mobile.

The Decision: Monorepo Architecture I decided to refactor the entire project into a Monorepo structure using npm workspaces.

packages/core: The "Brain" (Analytics, Gamification, Statistics). Pure TypeScript, no platform dependencies.

packages/vscode-extension: The "Desktop UI". Consumes the core.

packages/mobile: The "Mobile App" 📱 (Coming soon). Will consume the same core.

The "Red Screen" of Death Extracting the core wasn’t painless. As soon as I moved the files and updated the tsconfig.json, my terminal exploded.

101 TypeScript Errors.

It looked terrifying, but it was actually a roadmap. Every error was a dependency I needed to untangle.

Here is a 60-second timelapse of the process, from the chaos of 101 errors to the satisfaction of a clean compile:

Key Steps in the Migration Isolating Types: I moved all shared interfaces (like UserStats, Achievement) to the core package.

Configuring Paths: Updated tsconfig.json in the extension to map @dotsense/core to the local package.

Linking: Used npm install at the root to link the local packages together.

JSON // packages/vscode-extension/package.json { "dependencies": { "@dotsense/core": "*" } }

The Result After hours of fixing imports and decoupling logic, the build finally passed. Now, I have a single source of truth for my app’s logic.

If I fix a bug in the Core, it’s fixed for both VS Code and Android instantly.

Next stop: Building the Android Native Module with Kotlin!

Have you ever migrated a live project to a Monorepo? Let me know in the comments! 👇