Prime Agent

// Overview

Prime Agent is an open-source coding and research agent from Prime Intellect, built for general and long-running work. It is organised around two ideas. The Recursive Language Model (RLM) treats context as variables — prompt-as-a-variable — and treats tools, including recursive subagents, as function calls inside a persistent Python REPL. The Continual Harness stores supplemental prompts, memories, skill descriptions and reusable subagent specifications as durable state that the agent can refine through small, evidence-backed updates, local to the session by default.

In practice that makes the REPL the agent's main interface: file operations, shell commands, tool use, subagent spawning and context management all happen through code rather than a fixed tool schema. `rlm(...)` spawns real child agents for parallel or background work and returns their results programmatically, skills are importable Python packages, and `/refine` reviews the current trajectory and applies small updates to supplemental harness state — never rewriting the immutable base system prompt, with recorded snapshots so a refinement can be rolled back.

The harness is designed to outlive a single terminal. Daemon-backed sessions keep running when the terminal disconnects and can be reattached later; agents can message one another directly and steer each other's work; and automatic compaction, persistent goals, heartbeats and schedules keep long tasks moving across turns. The README is explicit that this is not a security boundary: Prime Agent executes model-generated Python and project commands with your user permissions, and its worker and kernel processes improve lifecycle isolation and recovery rather than sandboxing — untrusted code or instructions belong in an external sandbox.

// What it does

• Recursive Language Model design: context as variables, tools and subagents as function calls in a persistent Python REPL
• Built-in subagents via rlm(...), which spawn real child agents for parallel or background work and return results programmatically
• Continual Harness plus /refine — durable supplemental prompts, memories and skill specs the agent updates with evidence, with snapshots for rollback
• Executable skills as importable Python packages, with a built-in skill creator for recurring workflows
• Daemon-backed sessions that survive terminal disconnects, plus heartbeats, schedules, persistent goals and automatic compaction
• Direct agent-to-agent messaging so running agents can discover and steer one another

// Getting started

Install the released binary on macOS or Linux, then start the agent in the directory you want it to work in. The installer verifies the release's SHA-256 checksum and can prepare the Python runtime the agent uses.

curl -fsSL https://app.primeintellect.ai/prime-agent/install.sh | sh

cd /path/to/project
prime-agent

prime-agent agents
prime-agent attach <agent>
prime-agent --resume [path|id]

prime-agent status
prime-agent doctor [--fix]
prime-agent update [--force]
prime-agent shutdown [--force]

/goal
/refine
/heartbeat

Commands and code are distilled from the project's own documentation — always check the official repo for the latest.

// When to use it

• Run long-horizon coding or research work that has to survive terminal disconnects and context limits
• Fan a task out across parallel subagents from inside a Python REPL instead of a fixed tool schema
• Let recurring workflows harden into reusable, importable skills rather than repeated prompts
• Run agent evaluations and research experiments where trajectories and harness refinements need to be recorded and rolled back

// How Prime Agent compares

Prime Agent alongside other open-source autonomous coding agents tools AI/TLDR tracks, ranked by GitHub stars.