> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://lab.pollack.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# The Bud Family

> Four Spring Boot agents for controlled software work, and a sibling project beyond Spring

<div style={{display: 'flex', gap: '0.5rem', marginBottom: '1rem'}}>
  <span style={{background: '#334155', color: '#94a3b8', padding: '0.15rem 0.5rem', borderRadius: '4px', fontSize: '0.75rem'}}>Exploratory, product vision</span>
</div>

[Bud Spring](/projects/bud) is a family of agents for controlled software work, named and described publicly in [Agent Control Theory](https://blog.pollack.ai/agent-control-theory/). "Controlled" here means the same thing it means across this lab: instrumented runs, cascaded juries, benchmarks, and a recorded evidence trail, not just generation. A sibling project, Bud DDD, applies the same method to domain-driven-design review without tying it to Spring, Java, or any single framework.

## The four Bud Spring variants

| Variant | What it does |
| - | - |
| **Initialize** | Starts a new service, application, or repository on a clean foundation |
| **Actualize** | Turns specs, backlog, and product intent into working software |
| **Optimize** | Improves structure, coverage, reliability, and maintainability without changing what the software is supposed to do |
| **Modernize** | Brings legacy systems forward through framework upgrades, dependency and CVE remediation, and the slow tax of staying current |

## Bud DDD

A sibling project that applies the same controlled-work method to domain-driven-design review, deliberately not tied to Spring, Java, or any single framework.

## What's built today

[Bud](/projects/bud) is the Spring Boot IDE agent that is functional and documented today: early stage, ACP-native, delegating every LLM call to your approved CLI. It covers ground across more than one of the variants above without the family split being the product's own organizing idea yet. The Initialize/Actualize/Optimize/Modernize breakdown and Bud DDD are the vision named in the public research; they are not separately documented on this site today.

<Note>
  This page follows the homepage's own framing: these are examples of where the work leads, not the organizing idea of the lab. See [Where this work leads](/#where-this-work-leads) on the homepage.
</Note>

## Related

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Bud" icon="hammer" href="/projects/bud">
    The Spring Boot IDE agent that is built and documented today
  </Card>

  <Card title="Agento University" icon="graduation-cap" href="/product/agento-university">
    Another exploration of where this work leads: a fleet view for many stewards
  </Card>
</CardGroup>