Grove: your team, your Cypress Manager and Cedar, on your phone

Cypress was built for a desk. The people who use it mostly aren't at one. 🚚

A fleet manager answers an offer between two yard walks. A buyer decides on three F-150s from the cab of a truck. A closing stalls because the person who has to confirm the pickup is out at the lot. We expect about nine in ten of the people who use Grove to open it on a phone. 📱

So 4.0.0 is Cypress's second app. Grove is where an organization's team, its Cypress Manager and Cedar work together, and where Cypress's decisions come to a person one at a time, with the work already done. 🎯

And we built it the hard way on purpose: Grove has no back door. It reads and writes Cypress only through the public API, as the person signed in, with that person's role. Every time Grove needed something the API couldn't do, we added it to the API, for every partner. That's why the API is now 1.9.0, with 21 new tools. 🔑

It's the first time Cypress is two apps. That's why it's a major version. 🌳

---

📱 Made for the phone first

Four places in a tab bar at the bottom: Today, Huddle, Goals, Tasks. Hold a message or a car for its menu. Grove installs from the browser as an app on the home screen, with push notifications. 📲

On a computer the same places sit in a sidebar, and a right-click opens the menu. But the phone is the design, not the afterthought: every screenshot in the new docs chapter is a phone. 🖼️

☀️ Today: one brief, three decisions

Every morning, one brief, written from Cypress as you: 🗞️

• a headline ("Four offers are waiting and three closing steps are yours."),
• three numbers: live, in closing, need you,
• at most three decisions, the most pressing first,
• what was done for you, and what's next.

Tap a decision and it opens in its own thread, with its card pinned at the top. Answer it and the headline tells you what's left. ✅

✋ Nothing happens without your confirm

Every button on every card does the same three things: asks Cypress what would happen (a dry run), shows you, and makes one real call when you confirm. 🛡️

The same confirm never runs twice, and a confirm left open for more than two minutes is refused. An agent can bring you a card with everything filled in. It can never press the button. 🙅

💬 One huddle for the team, its Cypress Manager and Cedar

The organization's room, with the whole team, its Cypress Manager and the agents. A room with Cedar for each person. A channel per topic, or per car, buy target or goal, with owners and members. One-level threads, photos (made smaller and stripped of location data on your phone), files, audio notes, reactions, and a task from any message. 🗂️

And the same huddle in Cypress, on a computer. 🖥️ A new Huddle page in the sidebar shows every room you are in, the room, its threads and your Inbox. A message posted at a desk lands on the team's phones at once, and the other way round. @Cedar answers in a thread, wherever you ask. A Cypress Manager has two views: the organization they act for (read its huddle and open channels, then Join, and the room sees "Ana from Cypress joined") and Mine, every room they are in across their organizations, busiest first. Private channels stay by invitation. Behind both apps is Huddle, one conversations service: rooms, files, the Inbox and push live there, once. 🔗

Tasks live in Cypress now. A task made in Grove ("retake the Tahoe photos") is made in Cypress first, tied to its car, plan or conversation; finish it in Cypress and it closes in Grove. One list, two apps. ✅

🤝 A closing, step by step, in its own lane

Every sale in closing gets a deal lane: one room per side, where Sapele works the six steps (fee, bill of sale, funds, gate pass, title, pickup). Buyer and seller never talk directly; Cypress sits between. 🧱

• Deal Setup in the lane, with every blank named before anything prints. 📝
• The bill of sale sent for signature with the signers in order, after Grove checks it for blanks. ✍️
• The countersigned gate pass filed as a photo or a PDF at the pickup. 📸
• A problem at pickup filed from the lane, with its photos. 🚨
• A late step on the other side nudged once a day, never more. ⏰
• A reopen Cypress suggests is the Cypress Manager's call, with its impact first. ⚖️

Then we sold a Tacoma. 🛻 Before calling any of this done, we walked a real sale end to end on a local Cypress with real writes: Summit's buy target, Summit's offer, Northwind's counter, accept, Deal Setup on both sides, commission, bill of sale signed by both, gate pass, pickup. It turned up 15 things to fix or finish. Searching for "Toyota Tacoma" found nothing (make and model weren't split). One saved field marked the whole Deal Setup decision done. An empty pickup choice was a dead end. A location read "Dallas, TX, Dallas TX". 🙈 And on a phone, a pinned card the size of the screen covered the whole conversation. All fixed, and the Tacoma closed. 🏁

💲 Selling, the way Cypress already knows how

• Every offer with the facts worked out, and a suggested counter with Why this number: comparable sales, and the buyer's record with you (purchases, the last one, how fast they pay). 🔎
• Add a car from a photo of its VIN, or upload the week's defleet list as a spreadsheet. 📷
• Launch the ready cars, price a batch with your own rule, take a car off the market. 🏷️
• Listings gone cold (no views, saves or offers in 14 days), sorted by cause: too few photos first (one task for a teammate), then price (a 5% drop suggested, never more than 10%, never under the floor). One confirm, and a week later Grove reads the cars again and says what changed. 🧊

🛒 Buying in a sentence

"I'm looking for 3 Ford F-150s for next month." Cedar matches it to a target in your buy plan (or drafts one), checks it against your usual purchases and the market, and shows what fits now. 🎯

• Today's picks, each with why it's there. Not for me, with a reason, and the next picks learn. 🧠
• Offers on several cars at once; a seller's counter with the hours left on it. ⏳
• A car shared by direct link: paste it, and Grove opens it and checks it against your targets. 🔗

🧘 Zen or Huddle: two ways to use Grove

Some people want the whole app. Some want one conversation with Cedar that holds everything. So each person picks, in Profile, How Grove looks: 🌗

• Zen: one private conversation with Cedar. The day opens there with the brief and each decision as its card; what comes in later is one line from Cedar with a chip to see it. Nobody else sees it, your Cypress Manager neither. 🤫
• Huddle: the full app, with Today, the team's rooms and conversations, Goals and Tasks. 👥

Cedar even talks differently in each: plain and personal in Zen, the Cedar people know from Cypress with the team. After a few days in Zen, Cedar offers the fuller app once, with an 8-second video of both. 🎬

🚪 Try Cypress, no account

The sign-in page now opens with Try Cypress first: a visitor talks to Cedar with no account, about their own car. 🗝️

• Value first. What it's worth, a VIN read from a photo, what's on the market, before anything is asked of them. Cedar never quotes a figure it didn't look up. 🔎
• Their own account, in seconds. An email and the code Cypress's sign-in sends make them an individual account, with real limits (10 cars listed, 10 valuations, 3 people), and Cedar reads the chat into facts that become their deal in Cypress's book. 📒
• Become a dealer. An individual asks in Settings, finishes the same checklist every dealer does, and a Cypress Manager approves it: the same organization becomes the business, with its cars and offers. 🏢
• Behind it, one table of account rules that Cypress staff edit in Admin › Settings › Account rules, with a per-organization override. Every gate reads it, from the API to marketing sends. ⚖️

💵 What's my car worth? And how sure is that?

Most people don't know their VIN. So a value now says how sure it is (High, Good, Fair, Rough), what it rests on, and what would make it surer. 🎯 Black Book first (now, or a value Cypress already paid for), then what similar cars sold for on Cypress, then a model's estimate; every other source that agrees makes it surer. We copied production's 3,712 Black Book values into staging so it has real history to read. Someone else's car is only ever a range, never its figure. 🔒

📄 This week's list, from a spreadsheet

Send Cedar the CSV or Excel file. Cypress reads it the way its Import screen does (the same column matching, now shared), and the card asks only what it must, one thing at a time: a guessed column, the same VIN twice, a mileage that went down, a lot Cypress doesn't know, a sold car. Then every car as a table before you run it: New, Update (each field from → to), No change, Left out and why. 🧾 Walking it caught a real one: a duplicate row would have taken a Rogue from 29,100 to 25,500 miles without asking. Now it asks. 🛑

🚦 Drafts: ready, then live

Imported cars come in as drafts, off the market. Cedar then posts a card with each draft and five checks: a cover photo, its condition checked by a person (an import sets "Good" when the file says nothing, so someone has to look), mileage, a lot and a floor. Fix each car on the card, photos included. 📸

• How they go live shows your pricing rules in the order Cypress tries them, in plain words, and lets you make or change one right there: which cars, list or review, the price over the floor, the offer thresholds. 🧮
• Each ready car says what the rule would do ("lists it at $22,890") before anything moves; Go live sends them through it. ✅
• What runs by itself lists your automations that move, price or list cars, with Pause. Building it, we found an automation could mark a car "Listed" without really listing it. That's fixed in Cypress (below). 🔧

📲 Installs like an app, and says when it's new

Profile › This device installs Grove (or shows the steps for an iPhone), with its own icon, the three plants. 🌱 An open Grove checks for a new version when you come back to it and every 15 minutes, and says "A new version of Grove is ready · Reload". Grove is 1.0.0 and Huddle is 1.0.0, each with its own changelog now, beside Cypress's. 🏷️

🧑‍💼 Cypress Managers, one organization at a time

A Cypress Manager signs in and sees every organization they manage on Today, with what needs a person in each ("6 decisions across 2 organizations"). They act for one at a time, under an amber Acting for bar, and Profile says exactly what that organization lets Cypress do, with its end date. 🟧 Nothing in the others goes unseen, even a missed notification: a message for them there slides in named by its organization, then waits under Other organizations on top of Huddle and of the Inbox, both counted, and Switch shows the number, live. One tap switches there and opens it.

Everything they do is recorded in Cypress as done by them, for that organization, from Grove. Below the floor stays the organization's own fleet manager or admin. Always. 🔒

📥 Everything in your Inbox, calm on the lock screen

Inside the app, you hear about everything, as it happens. 🛎️ A new offer, a seller's counter, a match for your buy plan, a closing step that's due, a task Cedar handed you, a mention: each lands in your Inbox, slides in as a banner while Grove is open, and counts on the home-screen icon. We tested it with a real offer from Summit on Northwind's CR-V: the banner was on Northwind's phone 26 seconds later, and one tap opened the offer with its card. ⚡

The lock screen stays quiet unless you say otherwise. ☕

• A direct message comes within seconds: someone wrote to you, by name. Not while you're already reading that conversation, on any device. Turn it off in Profile if you'd rather read them in the app.
• One brief a day, at the time you pick.
• At most two interruptions a day, and only for a decision whose deadline falls before your next brief.
• Never from 7 PM to 7 AM in your time zone. Never twice for the same thing.
• Want more? In Profile, turn on the kinds you want each time: offers, matches, Cedar needs you, closings, your team. Each comes at once, quiet hours kept. 🎚️

And in Cypress, Huddle in the sidebar carries a number: your unread direct messages, your room with Cedar and mentions, across every organization you're in. 🔢

🗣️ Talk with Cedar

Tap Talk from any screen and just say it. Cedar answers out loud and puts the card on screen. Nothing is ever confirmed by voice: you confirm on the card. 🎙️

⚡ Cedar, in two seconds

On October 28, asking Cedar "which offer should I answer first?" took 14.6 seconds at the median, and 28 seconds for the slowest tenth. 🐢 We looked at why: the model spent 1,239 thinking tokens on date math and rankings to write a 45-token answer. And a fast model left to do that math alone named the wrong offer "the oldest". 😬

The fix wasn't a bigger model. Cypress now works the facts out (which offer is oldest, how far under the floor, the order to answer in, how late a step is) and the model just says them. 🧮

Each answer graded by a stronger model against exactly what Cedar read in Cypress. The first row is the calibration run that started it; the others are Cedar's 14-question benchmark. When the fast model is busy, a stronger backup answers, more slowly. 🏎️

🌲 Four agents, one set of rules

Cedar (fleet advisor) has company: Sakura (sales), Sequoia (market and plans) and Sapele (closings), each named on the cards it brings. What each may do alone is set rule by rule in Teach Cedar: Off, Watches, Asks or Acts. 🎚️

A floor, an answer below the floor and money received are People only, whatever the levels say. Pause all stops every agent at once, and Activity lists what Cedar did alone and the rule that let it. ⏸️

🔍 "Why?" and "Correct Cedar"

Every answer has a Why Cedar said this: what it read in Cypress, what it went by, its three checks (short, numbers from Cypress, no claims without proof), the model and the time. 🧾

Wrong answer? Correct Cedar. Say what it should have been; Cedar answers again and keeps one line, a lesson it follows from then on, for you or for the whole team. Lessons sit in Teach Cedar, to edit or remove. Cedar also remembers you across threads (see it, or Forget all, in Profile) and keeps a team memory the whole organization shares. 🧠

🧪 Cedar quality: staff can see how Cedar does

A new staff page in Cypress, Admin › Cedar quality: 📊

• Benchmarks: every run of Cedar's benchmark (14 real questions, checked against Cypress and timed), with two gates: 95% right and the slowest tenth under 4 seconds. A model change ships only if it passes both. Benchmarks run only in sandbox organizations, never with a customer's data.
• Audit: the answers worth a second look: a check failed, a person corrected Cedar, the judge scored it low, or picked at random from shared rooms. Staff mark Right, Wrong (with the right answer) or Dismiss.
• The loop closes. Every ten minutes Grove sends what needs a look and reads the verdicts back. A Wrong with Teach this org becomes a team lesson Cedar follows for that organization from then on. 🔁

🔑 Every member can sign in to an app

To build Grove on the public API, the API had to let a whole team in, not only the admin who connected an app. Now: 🚪

• Any member of a connected organization signs in to the app as themselves, with the scopes the connection holds. Never more: an admin who narrows the connection narrows every token on it, and removing it ends them all. ✂️
• A person in several organizations picks which one at sign-in.
• A Cypress Manager can sign in to a Cypress app for one business customer and act as staff for it, re-checked on every call. Partner apps never get that. 🛡️
• A Cypress app can carry the person's confirmation on the one call they confirmed on screen, so a fleet manager can accept below the floor from Grove. The audit trail says "Grove for Alex (confirmed in the app)". ✍️

🧮 Offers and closings with the facts worked out

The fix that made Cedar fast is in the API, for everyone: offers carry how long they've waited, the share of the listing price, the gap to the floor, the order to answer in and why ("above the floor by $600, waiting 20h, 96.2% of listing"). Closings carry how late each step is ("8 hours late", never "due today"), whose turn it is, and the one to act on first. A counter you got says the hours left on it. ⏱️

🧰 21 new tools for every partner

Grove needed them, so everyone gets them (API and MCP 1.9.0): 🛠️

• Comparable sales, with other sellers' sales only as a rounded range and only with enough of them to keep everyone anonymous. 🕶️
• Damage lines, keys and a damage note on a car, and bidders told when the condition changes.
• Undo an archive within 24 hours. ↩️
• Staged imports: each row's problems found first, decided row by row, then applied. Location aliases ("DEN"). 📦
• Edit a pricing rule; floors from the wholesale value plus a percent. 💲
• Picks that learn, and a buyer's usual purchases.
• Direct links addressed to one buyer, who's told, and can open and offer through it. 🔗
• The organization's Cypress Manager, delegation with an end date, and bank transfers held for a person.
• Cedar quality tools, for Cypress's own apps only.

🧹 Fixed along the way

• The dashboard told two stories. Northwind's Wholesale GMV read $1.7M on load and $1.0M after one click, and "365 days" quietly read as 30. 🤦 Now the first view, the period switch and the API share one computation, and the trend chart that drew no real data is a real "Vehicles sold" per day. 📈
• Bidders weren't told when a car's condition, keys or damages changed. Now every open-offer buyer is. 📣
• No app could file the countersigned gate pass, so a pickup worked from an app could never finish. Fixed. 🏁
• Security: an incident message could attach a file filed for a different closing. Not anymore. 🔐
• A Cypress Manager's batch "apply pricing rules" mixed every organization's rules. Each car now follows Cypress's rules and its own organization's only. ⚖️
• An automation could "list" a car without listing it: the status said Listed, but there was no listing, no offer rules, and an individual's 10-car limit didn't count it. Now it's a real launch, or a refusal that says why. 🏷️
• "Toyota Camry" found nothing in the marketplace search (one phrase, one field), and "SUV" never matched. Now every word counts. 🔍
• Security: email-only offers joined an account only once its email was proved; before, the address typed was enough. 🔐

📚 A Grove chapter in the docs, phone first

19 new pages: an overview, a quickstart, what you can do by role, 12 how-to guides (choose Zen or Huddle, install Grove, answer an offer, import a spreadsheet, get drafts ready and take them live, talk with Cedar, work a closing, buy cars, follow the quarter's plan, tasks and hand-offs, teach and correct Cedar, act for an organization) and a reference with a glossary of about 70 terms, the agents, quiet hours, and data and privacy. Every guide's screenshots are phone captures in a phone frame. 📖

---

🧭 Why this release matters

Cypress is where the work is recorded. Grove is where it gets done: on a phone, in a yard, one decision at a time, with an agent that did the arithmetic and a person who says yes. 🌱

And because Grove came in through the front door, every door we opened for it is now open to every partner. 🚪