Making Turborepo 96% faster with agents, sandboxes, and humans
By Steven Van ·
Task graph computation is 81-91% faster and Time to First Task is 11x quicker on Vercel's own 1,000+ package monorepo.
Vercel's Turborepo now computes its task graph 81-91% faster, with the gain scaling by repository size. On Vercel's own 1,000+ package monorepo, that overhead drops from around 10 seconds to feeling instant, and Time to First Task is 11 times faster. Testing against open source Turborepos and customer canary releases pushed the improvement as high as 96%, depending on the size and complexity of the repo.
The gains came from eight days mixing AI coding agents, Vercel Sandboxes, and manual engineering, not a single fix. Vercel set eight unattended coding agents loose overnight on different parts of Turborepo's Rust codebase; three produced changes that shipped, including a roughly 25% reduction in wall-clock time from hashing by reference instead of cloning a HashMap, and a roughly 6% win from replacing the twox-hash crate with xxhash-rust.
