---
title: "Standards — the grammar underneath"
date: 2026-08-01T11:15:00
draft: false
categories: ["Standards"]
tags: ["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](https://flove.org/docs/) and its [paradigms](https://flove.org/docs/paradigms.html)
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._
