Prime Intellect open-sources Prime Agent, a self-improving harness
MIT-licensed, it runs sub-agents as async function calls in one IPython kernel, rewrites its own harness via /refine, and edged the human expert on ARC-AGI-3.
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One curl, and you have a self-improving agent
Prime Intellect's Prime Agent installs on Linux or macOS with a single curl command and runs immediately — no container required. It's fully open under MIT, so you fork the harness itself, not just call an API.
Sub-agents are just function calls now
The “Recursive Language Model” hands the model one tool — a persistent IPython kernel — and every sub-agent spawns as await rlm('sub-task'), returning at admission instead of blocking. Skills and tools live as Python in that same kernel, so the agent runs functions over its data rather than re-reading it through tool calls.
It rewrites its own harness with /refine
Run /refine and the agent reads its own trajectory, then applies the smallest CRUD edit to its prompt, skills, sub-agents, or memory — every change logged and rollback-able by transaction ID. The base system prompt stays immutable as a guardrail.
It edged the human expert on ARC-AGI-3
Paired with Opus 5, Prime Agent scored 95.5% Best@1 on ARC-AGI-3 — just past the 95.4% human-expert baseline — and 99.97% Best@3 across all 183 levels. On EmulatorBench it wrote working SEGA Genesis and Game Boy Color emulators in Rust from spec, with no reference code.
Bring your own login or your own GPU
It runs on subscription logins you already pay for — Claude Pro/Max, Codex, Copilot — plus API keys (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Groq, Fireworks), Bedrock, Azure, and self-hosted vLLM, Ollama, or LM Studio. In their tests GLM-5.2, Opus 5, and GPT-5.6 Sol each beat their native harnesses on 6-8 of 9 long-context benchmarks.
Not a sandbox — isolate it before you run it
Prime Intellect is explicit that worker and kernel processes are not a security boundary; sub-agents executing arbitrary Python in a shared kernel means a throwaway CI box, not your laptop. Build this weekend: point it at a repo behind a test gate and let it refactor overnight.