Every starter makes the same promise: skip the boring setup. January was about earning that. A monorepo, a Studio, a frontend and a handful of decisions you would otherwise make at 11pm on day one.
One repo, two apps
The project landed as a Turborepo with the Next.js frontend and the Sanity Studio living next to each other. Shared tooling, one install, one place to run everything. You stop syncing two repos by hand, and changes to schema and frontend ship in the same pull request.
Common schema types from day one
Reusable schema definitions arrived in the first commits, so documents share the same building blocks instead of re-declaring fields. Later in the month a settings schema joined them, giving you one place for site-wide values rather than hard-coding them in components.
Name tokens for what they do
The Sanity API token was renamed to SANITY_API_WRITE_TOKEN. A small change, but the name now tells you exactly how much power it holds. It does not belong anywhere near the browser.
Boring foundations, laid early. That is the whole point of a starter.