When building an application with Node.js, it's common to extract logic into isolated modules to improve maintainability and reusability. This approach allows sharing code across multiple consumers, testing at the module level, versioning changes independently, and enabling open-sourcing for collaboration. However, managing these modules can become complex when dealing with multiple versions of the same module or issues like instanceof checks that require a single installation of a module. To address this, Contentful developed `gitify-dependencies`, a tool that replaces node modules with their respective repositories, utilizing git-new-workdir to enable collaborative editing across multiple working directories. This approach allows modifying dependencies as part of the application while keeping track of changes via git, simplifying the process of managing complex applications with many dependencies.