The road so far
Before the devlog picks up entry by entry, here’s the whole arc in one place — how flove got from an idea to the thing you can install today.
By the numbers
flove is young and dense. As of this first post:
- ~2 months of building — first commit 7 May 2026, and it hasn’t stopped.
- 1,100+ commits on the main line, from a single pair of hands.
- ~30 apps, and 70-plus single-file builds once you count their tiers and variants, grouped in about ten clusters — browse them all at flove.org/apps.
- Built as an intense human + AI pairing — on the order of 120 sessions of working side by side with Claude.
Small team, short calendar, a lot of ground. Here’s how it fits together.
The bet
flove started from a discomfort with the extractive internet: platforms tuned to harvest attention, measure it, and sell it back. The counter-bet is simple to say and hard to build — an internet where relating matters more than extracting. Slow instead of urgent, warm instead of optimized, human-scale instead of infinite. That bet had to become something you could touch, so flove grew as a set of concrete tools rather than a manifesto.
The apps
The visible surface of flove is its apps — small, single-file pages, each exploring one facet of relating: writing (blogy), deciding and rating (keys), sharing what you make (appy), everyday economics (dealy), trust (trusty), and more. They’re deliberately humble: mostly HTML and CSS, JavaScript only where it earns its place, no build step, and they keep working offline. You can read each one like a page, not a black box.
Standards: the family grammar
Why does a collection of independent little apps feel like one calm, coherent thing? Because they share a set of standards — not bureaucracy, but care made repeatable: the same gentle look, the same respect for your attention and your data, the same promises kept in every corner. Underneath that sit a shared design contract, a canonical vocabulary, a mandatory step-by-step onboarding, a single summary-and-export contract, and a tier model that lets each app meet you at the size you want. Each app still keeps its own character; the standards are the grammar, not the script. They’re all gathered now on one page — flove’s standards.
Tiers and distributions
Two ideas gave the collection room to grow without sprawling. Tiers: most apps come at several sizes — from a mini that does one thing up through richer versions — so the same idea can meet you at the complexity you want. And distributions: the working distro you use today, plus a portable, pure-CSS specification meant to travel — flove’s ideas expressed cleanly enough to be rebuilt on other platforms, not just this one.
The theory underneath
Under the apps sits the part that will get its own Theory shelf here later: a coordinate system for placing things in relation to one another, and a fuzzy ontology — soft axes instead of hard categories, because relating rarely fits in a box. The apps are, in a sense, that theory made usable.
Making it yours to keep
The most recent stretch pushed hard on one principle: flove should be something you keep, not a service that keeps you. So flove became installable and fully offline — a downloadable package you can run with no server, launchers for each desktop, even an Android build. If flove.org vanished tomorrow, your copy would still open. All of it is built from a single local source of truth, versioned, and published to the open web — the same workshop this blog is now part of.
That’s the road so far. The next post covers what landed most recently; from there, the devlog just keeps walking.
slow it · flow it · love it.