Plasma Open-Sources Fractal: A Local CLI Tool for Recursive Agent Trees

Plasma AI has officially open-sourced the command-line tool Fractal under the Apache 2.0 license. Designed to tackle the challenge of complex programming tasks exceeding a single agent's context window, it transforms a single Claude Code or Codex session into a continuously expanding recursive agent tree, leveraging hierarchical task decomposition to handle demanding development requirements.

Core Mechanisms and Constraints

Each node in Fractal operates with an independent git branch, worktree, memory, and lifecycle, following a five-step cycle: "prepare, plan, execute, review, commit." When spawning child nodes, the parent node allocates the budget layer by layer. The system enforces a unified budget via the root node to constrain overall execution, allowing hard limits to be set on depth, branching factor, iteration count, and wall-clock time.

Technical Architecture

The tool runs entirely locally without any special hosted runtimes or "magic" backends. Its underlying coordination, persistence, and terminal session management rely exclusively on standard local tools: git worktrees, tmux sessions, and a local SQLite database.

2026-07-22 ~ 2026-07-22 · 7 related posts

• Plasma AI Open-Sources Fractal: A Tool for Hierarchical Agent Loops — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-07-22
• [source] Plasma open-sources Fractal, a local recursive agent tree for complex coding tasks — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-07-22
• Fractal gives each node its own branch, lifecycle, and five-step agent loop — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-07-22
• Fractal adds root budgets, Markdown memory files, and hard caps for recursive agents — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-07-22
• Fractal runs entirely on git worktrees, tmux, and a local SQLite database — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-07-22
• A local AI coding project uses git worktrees, tmux, and SQLite instead of a magic runtime — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-07-22

1 near-duplicate retellings: rohanpaul_ai