Setup
Three steps. The session does the rest.
You need git and an AI coding agent — anything that can hold a session in a folder, read and write files, and run terminal commands. The kernel is client-neutral; Claude Code is the tested reference, and any agent meeting those minimums works in plain words.
One thing you’ll notice inside the repository: a Claude/ folder. That name is heritage, not a dependency — FRACTAL was built with Claude Code, and the folder keeps the name of the era that built it. Any capable agent reads it exactly the same. FRACTAL is an independent project with no affiliation with Anthropic.
Operating systems: macOS (the tested reference) and Linux run the lines below verbatim. On Windows, run them in Git Bash — it ships with Git for Windows — and where a command says python3, Windows spells it py. Nothing else differs: the memory is plain files, the same on every system.
Get FRACTAL
Where should it land on your machine?
You don’t create the folder yourself — the command below creates it, at exactly the spot you pick; anywhere is fine. This copy is the hatch, not the home: birth your own project and that project gets its own folder, chosen consciously in the interview — this one becomes scaffolding you can delete.
A “detached HEAD” notice is expected — you are standing on the newest release. This clone is a reference, not your project.
Open a session in that folder
That is the reference client’s command — with another agent, open this folder the way that client opens projects.
Type exactly this as your first message
The session takes it from there: it explains what you’re looking at and offers the two paths — start your own FRACTAL-governed project, or look around first. The word is the command in any agent (Claude Code also offers it as a slash-command with autocomplete — one client’s spelling); the plain words do the same: “I’m new here — welcome me.” Your project will not live in this folder; the birth creates a new repository of your own.
The idea
The repository is the product.
The README’s own words: “This repository does not implement FRACTAL. It is FRACTAL” — the first living instance, a project that governs itself with its own machinery.
Weeks of context accumulate in one chat thread; the thread hits its limit and dies. The next session starts ignorant — you paste summaries, re-explain old decisions, watch the AI contradict things it settled last week. FRACTAL moves the memory out of the chat entirely: no server to run, no database, and nothing phones home.
The wider frame: real investigation is fragmented — every switch between web, AI, literature, data, notebooks, code, and prose forces context to be rebuilt from nothing. FRACTAL folds that lifecycle into one continuous workflow and preserves the entire reasoning process, not just results.
Its governing philosophy is recursive simplicity: complex understanding emerges from repeatedly applying a small set of simple, composable rules. Begin from the smallest abstraction; add only what an observed problem requires.
Context is an external dependency that is loaded — not history carried in the chat. The memory lives in your repo, not in any vendor’s product.
The model
A copy, not an account.
FRACTAL is not a service you connect to. Birthing a project copies the constitution into a repository you own — no login, no tenant, no home server. Your copy is yours forever. An instance calls nothing upstream at run time; no vendor — including FRACTAL’s own author — can break, deprecate, or surveil it. A never-upgraded instance works forever.
Updates are offers. Publishing a new kernel updates no one; a living instance adopts a release only by its own recorded decision. Staying current is a decision you make, never a default you suffer. And “true” means the anchored lineage: the signed, externally anchored release chain, verifiable from any clone — with one home address for the baseline.
Go deeper
One public home.
The mirror is the permanent public version of FRACTAL — a stable, standardized, versioned form anyone can take and make their own. The anchored private history stands in reserve as the priority proof.
- The repositorythe public home — the baseline, versioned
- READMEthe front door, quickstart first
- The guideday two onward
- GENESISbirth your own instance
- Provenancethe proof chain
Where it heads, on the record’s own terms: the public home is designed to one day become a service surface — a guide plus a registry of standards and skills that any instance resolves by pointer, so starting a governed project approaches the cost of one address. That layer is vision, banked, not built — the record’s own rule is that nothing is built before its trigger fires — and its first candidate entry is being forged in real use right now.
Contact
One address.
Questions, frictions, field reports — the project reads its mail: fractal@knet.network
The public home on GitHub: github.com/mstruppe/fractal-mirror — and its issue templates are the project’s open field door: a friction you hit or a win worth recording, filed in your own words, lands in the same intake the project’s own field notes use.