Comment by tengstrand

When you start a Polylith codebase from scratch, you can start implementing your business logic and your components before you have even decided how to execute the code in production. The components can talk directly to each other and you only need the development project to begin with. Then you may decide that yo want to expose your functionality as e.g. a REST API, so you now need to create a base and a project where you put that base and your components. Now you have two projects, one for development and one for your REST service, which both looks the same. Some times later you decide to split your single service into one more service. You still have all the tests set up in development but the way you run the code in production has changed. How you execute your code in production is seen as an implementation detail in Polylith. While developing the system, it's really convenient to work with all your code from the single development project, especially if your language has support for a REPL. If you need a production like environment, then you can have that too, but with that said, you will most probably spend most of your time in the single development environment because that's where you are most productive.