Sometimes you're working on something no project covers yet, or a project's details are out of date. You can fix that from your terminal, or ask your coding agent to.
Important: none of these commands asks you to confirm. When your coding agent runs them, it should show you what it plans to do first, and wait for your OK.
Create a project
grove project create --initiative <slug> --short-name "Move a visit myself" --long-name "Customers move a booked visit without calling"
The project starts as Unplanned. It isn't assigned to your worktree. To pick it up, run grove project assign with its new ID.
A short name:
Has up to 6 words and 48 characters.
Uses sentence case, and only letters, numbers, spaces, ' and &. No hyphens or acronyms.
Names the outcome first, then who gets it, such as "Consistent identity for leads."
A new project has no plan yet. Write its summary, or ask your product lead to plan it in Grove.
Create an initiative
grove initiative create "Pro availability calendar" --description "Pros can't set their own hours..."
An initiative's name has up to 10 words and 100 characters. Grove keeps the description exactly as you write it, and uses it to start the initiative's plan. Grove prints the new initiative's slug. Use the slug in other commands.
Create an initiative only when no existing one fits. grove initiative list shows the ones you have.
Change a project's details
grove project set P-003 --status building --priority high --target 2026-11-30
Option | What it sets |
| The names. Pass |
| The status or priority, by value or label. |
| The lead, by name. Pass |
| Adds a person to the members. Removes nobody. |
| Replaces the whole members list. Repeat it for each person. |
| A date, as YYYY-MM-DD. Pass |
Only the options you give change. Grove prints each change, from the old value to the new one. If a name matches more than one person, Grove lists them and changes nothing.
Use --add-member to add someone. --member replaces everyone, so it can drop people added since you last looked.
To change an initiative, use grove initiative set <slug>, with --name, --description, --short-description, --lead, --target, --start, --priority, or --status.
Move a project
grove project move P-003 --initiative <slug>
The project keeps everything: its names, status, people, dates, and documents. Both initiatives must already exist. You can't move a project into an archived initiative.
Archive work
grove project archive P-003
grove initiative archive <slug>
Archiving an initiative also archives every project in it.
You can't undo archiving in Grove. Check the IDs with grove project list or grove initiative list first. Name each one back to the person who asked, and get their OK.