# Philosophy The whole motivation behind Novel was to make it easy for engineers to start and maintain convention but allow enough escape hatches for growth. The development of Novel follows the same vein. ## **Monolith-First** Learn the domains of the business as safe as possible ## Low Overhead Make use of as little dependencies and managed service as possible ## **Security-first** Be paranoid of data coming in or out ## **Simple Interfaces** Consistent and small interfaces ## **Transparent Tooling** Wrestling with tooling costs money ## **Development-team Friendly** The code should be easy to jump into --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.novel.dev/philosophy.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.