The Leather Apron Club · an end-to-end account & training guide
How the Tools
Found Their People
What Code Puppy was. How it worked. How a handful of seats became seventy-five thousand and counting. And the two people who proved that what you already know is enough to begin.
I · THE PUPPYWhat Code Puppy was
Code Puppy began as an open-source project by Michael Pfaffenberger: a command-line apprentice that could read a codebase, write code, run its own checks, and fix what it broke — and it explained itself the whole way.
It was not magic and it was not a product you bought. It was a working animal: eager, a little opinionated, endlessly patient. You gave it a task in plain sentences. It thought out loud — you could watch its reasoning stream past, correct it mid-sentence, and steer it like dictating to a secretary who was already typing. If it died mid-job, it came back and picked up where it left off.
The whole temperament fit in four behaviors:
| It does this | What that means for a person |
|---|---|
| It takes dictation | You speak the task on a drive. No new language to learn first. |
| It shows its work | Nothing happens in the dark. You watch it think, so you can trust it — or stop it. |
| You steer mid-run | Start typing while it works and it changes course. The human is the master of the shop. |
| It survives itself | It keeps its notes between visits. Progress is never lost to a crash. |
Everything that follows — the seventy-five thousand, the director title, this club — grew out of those four behaviors and one decision: the tool adapts to the person's existing knowledge, never the reverse.
II · HOW IT WORKSThe four habits of a good master
Before the scale, there was the craft of working with the apprentice. It fits on an index card, and it is the actual training:
| Habit | Why |
|---|---|
| Point before you speak | Start it in the folder you want worked on. It cannot wander outside that drawer. Everything else stays untouched. |
| Ask for drafts, not miracles | “Draft a reply” beats “handle my email.” Small, clear tasks come back right the first time. |
| Read before you trust | It shows its work. Give it a glance. It is diligent, but you are the master of the shop. |
| Steer mid-course | Type while it works and it changes direction — like dictating to a secretary who is already typing. |
That is the entire manual. A person who can write a sentence can run it on day one. That sentence is the whole onboarding.
seats · and counting
Inside one of the largest companies on earth, the tool moved the way good tools actually move — not by decree from the top, but hand to hand. This is the shape of that arc:
First · the handful
Ten to fifteen people, and a working animal
A small circle of engineers used the puppy because it made their days better. No rollout plan. No memo. Just neighbors showing neighbors a thing that works — the oldest distribution network there is.
Then · the trainer arrives
John Choi — the craft made teachable
A UI/UX designer and trainer, brought aboard with Ashley's help, did the thing that separates tools that spread from tools that die: he applied it to real work, in front of real people, and trained them — not on theory, on their own tasks. He made the steering visible. He made the drafts safe to trust. Every session ended with someone's actual work done.
Then · the multiplier
Every person trained became a trainer
The four habits fit on an index card, so they traveled on index cards. Honest requirements — say what you actually need. Clear timelines — small, dated, real. Those two disciplines did more for adoption than any feature ever did: people trusted the tool because the expectations were honest.
Now · the count continues
Seventy-five thousand and counting
Not because a mandate came down, but because watching a neighbor finish their real work in front of you is the only advertisement that has ever worked.
IV · THE TRANSCENDENCEThe person who proved it
Here is the part that matters most, and it is a person, not a number.
My wife, Ashley, is thirty-five years old this month. She has no college degree. She is now Director of Agentic Work for all of Marketplace — and she is already transcending that.
She did not climb the ladder that was given. She built a new one, out of the thing this whole account is about: she took the tools to people who had been told the tools were not for them, and she organized the work the honest way — real requirements, clear timelines, and a standing refusal to pretend that any of this requires a credential to touch.
The tool never asked her where she went to school. It asked her what needed to be done. It turns out that was the only question that mattered.
V · THE METHODSix rules, distilled from all of it
This is the end-to-end method — the one you can run with your own council, your own team, your own town:
VI · THE EXERCISESHow to run it yourself
Exercise one · the first evening
The one-task pledge.Bring one task you would love to never do again — a pile of receipts, a messy folder, a letter you keep meaning to write. Speak it to the apprentice. Finish it that night. Leave with the work done and the trick of it learned.
Exercise two · the second week
The teach-back.Whoever finished a task last week now runs the session for someone new — on the newcomer's task, not their own. The four habits fit on an index card; hand them the card at the end.
Exercise three · every council
The honest-requirements drill.Before any task is spoken, say it plainly to a neighbor first: what is actually needed, and by when. If the neighbor cannot repeat it back, the requirement is not honest yet. Then give it to the apprentice.
VII · THE CODAWhy this club exists
Spruce Grove — the apprentice this club teaches — is grown from the same open-source root as Code Puppy, replanted around values of its own: together we are better, always. The story above is why the Leather Apron Club holds its councils: because the method is not an enterprise secret. It is a community craft — older than any of this. Franklin's circle called it mutual improvement. The shops called it apprenticeship. We call it Friday.
Bring one honest question. Bring one task you would love to never do again. The tools will meet you where you already stand — that is the entire discovery, and it is reproducible in any room with a table and enough chairs.