# Standards — the grammar underneath

1 Aug 2026 · Standards · flove standards skills shelf

A language isn’t beautiful because every sentence is beautiful; it’s useful because the grammar underneath is agreed on. The standards shelf is flove’s grammar — the rules the whole workshop quietly agrees to so that a human and a machine can build together in the same voice, on the same ground, without having to re-decide everything twice. It’s the least glamorous shelf and the one that makes every other shelf possible.

## What’s on it

Standards are the how underneath the what:

- The frontend contract — how a flove app is supposed to be built, so that every single-file app follows the same calm, framework-free grammar.
- The backend plan — where data lives and how it behaves when the network isn’t there to help.
- Vocabulary and coordinates — flove’s shared words and its shared map, so that “here” means the same thing to both pairs of hands.
- The tiers — the mini → basic → advanced ladder that keeps complexity earned instead of assumed.
- The skills — the keystone: flove’s rules written down as reproducible instruction files (this very blog has a blogy skill that dictates its voice) that teach the agent how flove wants to be built. Those skills live versioned, in their own repository, behind the wall.

You’ll find the deeper thinking on the public side, too — the docs and its paradigms pages are the theory the grammar grew out of.

## How it got here

Standards arrived the honest way: slowly, and because the work demanded them. Early flove sessions kept re-deciding the same small things, so Marc started writing the decisions down — first scattered, then gathered into one place. The breakthrough was turning those notes into skills: files the agent reads before it starts, so that “how flove does it” is something you can see, version, and improve instead of something you hope the assistant remembers. The standards recently found their current home in the development workspace, with a docsify home of their own, and they keep tightening with every session that follows them.

## What’s ahead

- Skills that keep teaching — every new understanding that survives a session should end up as a rule the next session can read.
- The questy rhythm — flove’s planning ritual keeps the standards honest: nothing gets standardized in theory, only after it’s proven itself in work.
- Sharing the grammar — a flove app should be able to be read like a sentence once you know the rules. The shelf wants to get there.

Grammar is invisible when it works and unforgivable when it doesn’t. This shelf exists so that flove’s is never forgiven for being absent — it’s written down, versioned, and used, every single day.

slow it · flow it · love it.

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