A grove, not a tree
Spruce Grove is a local-first agentic coding harness — and a small set of beliefs about who gets to build. This page is the plain account: what it is, why it is shaped the way it is, and where the name and the mark come from.
gran · lund · sv. · spruce grove
What it is
A harness, not a model. It borrows the intelligence; it owns the loop.
Spruce Grove is an agentic coding harness. It does not train a model or serve one. It glues the model you choose to the work you actually do — reading files, running commands, editing code, keeping a record — and it does that on your machine, in your working directory, under your account.
It comes in two faces that share one engine: a CLI for the terminal, and a desktop app that is a thin chassis around the same engine. One harness, many doors. The desktop never became a dependency of the thing that does the work — swap the surface and the engine is unchanged.
It runs on your machine, shows its work while it runs, and keeps the receipts.
Why it works this way
Every mechanism is downstream of a belief. Four of them shape the tool.
- Local-first, sovereign. The work stays on the machine; the customer is the product. Nothing about your session depends on someone else's server staying up, priced the way they choose, or deciding when you may be current.
- Receipts in public. Claims are traceable to the commit that earned them, and every number on the public surfaces is counted, not asserted. When something is unverified, it says so — a stated not verified beats a confident guess.
- The grove tends itself. It checks its own pulse on startup and upgrades when a newer self exists, without disturbing the session that noticed. It reports every self-heal in plain words, and it can always be told to wait — consent survives autonomy.
- Proven at the seams. The parts most projects forget — protocol fixtures, permission guards, the security floor — are the parts with tests. CSP and least privilege are locked by guards, not by memory.
None of that is decoration. A tool that touches your files and runs your commands has to be honest about what it did; the value is in being able to see the work, and to walk away with everything still yours.
The name and the mark
Start with the name, because the mark follows from it.
A grove is what you get when spruces grow together: no single tree carries the forest, but the stand outlasts any one of them. That is the whole thesis — it is the sentence the rest of the project is a footnote to.
The word itself is Scandinavian. gran is spruce; lund is grove — so the name we build under literally means spruce grove. We say that plainly, nothing fancier. A grove was named for a family, not after one: a surname that reads, in two old words, as the thing this is.
Three stepped spruces, one shared ground line. The center tree is gold — the light-bringer; its neighbors are stone, recessed. The application logo: nav, docs, sidebars.
The same geometry, dressed to stand alone: a cedar roundel, an inset keyline, the trio within. It carries favicon and app-icon duty, where only a disc survives.
Two rules carry forward. Geometry is the identity — never decorate it; the mark is drawn as strokes, in three symbols only, and no emoji ever. And one ground line: a stand shares one forest floor, the way a team shares one piece of ground. Below roughly twenty pixels, only the Disc survives; everything else is that one geometry, composed for a different job.
charcoal → spruce-deep → spruce → moss → cedar → mist — a dark-forest palette, grain over glitter
Where it comes from
Honest lineage, and the four sources the ethos is drawn from.
Spruce Grove is built from Code Puppy, an open-source agentic coding assistant by Michael Pfaffenberger, and stays import-compatible with it. The puppy shared everything; this grove exists because of that. The exact lineage, sync points, and rename map live in PROVENANCE.md. The project is Apache-2.0 licensed, and the upstream notice is preserved verbatim.
The ethos is older than the code. Four sources, one creed:
Ozark Bagels — how to carry yourself
Rules off a bagel-shop wall: be first to say hello, be kinder than necessary, be tough minded but tender hearted, leave everything better than you found it. Closer: spread joy, love, and cream cheese.
The Junto (1727) — how to think with others
Franklin's Leather Apron Club: love truth for truth's sake, no invented facts, ask “how can I help your honorable designs succeed?” Curiosity turned into civic infrastructure.
gran·lund — who is doing the carrying
Help people solve problems. Remove technology obstacles. Meet people where they are, as humans — and keep the work close to the people closest to the problem.
Wiggledom — how the work moves
Straight lines are brittle; the wiggle is fluid and stronger than almost anything. When the world feels like a straight line, be a wiggler.
Who holds it
Spruce Grove is stewarded by a small council in the Leather Apron tradition — a mutual-improvement circle where decisions start as questions, survive inquiry, and earn their way into the build. The council is three stewards, and they serve anonymously.
That is deliberate, and it is the same belief as the name. A grove outlasts its trees; the harness is not tied to any single person. The work carries no personal brand, so it can pass to whoever tends it next.
Read the originals
Everything above is sourced from documents in the repository. Read them for yourself.
- MANIFESTO.md — the founding story, dictated in one sitting.
- ETHOS.md — the four pillars, and the grove that tends itself.
- BRAND.md — the name, the mark, and the design language.
- GOVERNANCE.md — the council, the gate, and the approval wall.
- PROVENANCE.md — exact lineage to Code Puppy, and the rename map.
- The source — read it, fork it, run it.