Concepts

The guide

From zero to a governed project.

The in-depth path — installing nothing, birthing your own instance, driving sessions, closing them — lives on its own page, step by step.

Open the guide →

Command library

A command is a one-word act.

Sessions are driven by a handful of commands — and where one must be aimed, it takes a target (/command <target>), so a few words serve a growing project. The words always work even where slash-commands don’t: each is plain language a session understands.

Every command is a compressed projection of a standard — the dictionary entry links to the source it compresses, in the bibliography below.

• /welcomefirst contact — what FRACTAL is, where you’re standing, the paths outsource: welcome.md
• /beginthe onboarding interview — five real questions, then the birth of your own instancesource: begin.md
• /<yourproject>your instance’s opener, carrying its own name — loads the memory, reports where things stand, waits for directionspecimen: fractal.md — the baseline’s own
• /closeends a working cycle — the handover written, the checkers run, the memory savedsource: close.md
• /fieldnoteone-line capture of a friction or a win, mid-work — recorded, then straight back to the tasksource: fieldnote.md
• /looka read-only window into another of your instances — observation, never interferencesource: look.md

Entry declares the project (each instance’s opener is its own name); closing is universal. One conversation, one open loop.

Hardwired and taught

The commands above ship in the public baseline — hardwired in the mirror, born into every new instance. Beyond them, an instance can grow its own: a custom command is a small stamped file teaching the session a procedure in your project’s own words. How to teach a command — the recipe and its rules — lands here in the content pass.

The rule register

Rules are made by talking, kept by the record.

Every FRACTAL project carries a rule register — a numbered ledger of every rule and decision the project has ever made, each row carrying its reasoning. It is one of FRACTAL’s backbones: nothing governs because the AI happens to remember it. A thing governs because it stands in the register — and every session reads the register.

You make a rule by saying it. “From now on, we do X” — the session records it as a numbered decision with its why, and every session after honors it. Change your mind later and the register records that too: decisions supersede one another on the record, nothing is overwritten — the same never-lose-anything mechanic as the canonical documents.

This is also how you tune the language itself: if your agent ever misreads a command, or you simply want your own words for things, establish the rule once — “in this project, wrap up means close” — and it is law from then on, in every session, whichever agent drives. Your project is born with its register seeded; by tradition its first entry is your first real decision.

Bibliography

A bibliography of AI workflow standards.

Every procedure FRACTAL runs on is a written, versioned, ratified standard — distilled from executed history, never designed in the abstract. This section catalogs them the way a paper cites its sources: identity, version, status, claim. The commands above are their compressed spoken forms; together they grow toward a shared working language for AI agents — naturally born from use.

Four of these already have their stories told on the procedures blog; each standard’s full text ships in the public baseline.

The catalog’s substrate is the Registry that ships in the baseline — honest statuses, provenance attached. As standards mature they gain their entry here; nothing is listed before it is ratified in the record.

Extensions

The sandbox shelf.

Concepts proven here become things you can take: a standard’s full text, a command file to teach your instance, a procedure to adopt — fractal sandbox extensions, downloadable, versioned, signed with the release they ship in.

The shelf opens with the content pass — its first stock is the eight standards above, each as an adoptable file. Until then, everything listed ships inside the public baseline itself.