PRAXIST

Praxist runs research as a long-lived process instead of a chat session. You point it at a project that already runs and has a measurable objective, and it coordinates parallel research agents, evaluates each one against a task-owned scoring function, keeps durable evidence of what was tried, and carries findings from one generation of attempts into the next. The pitch is a personal R&D team rather than a coding assistant.

Setup is real work. It is a Python 3.11+ install with agent and Codex extras, an interactive wizard covering license acceptance, credentials, and readiness checks, then a separate takeover step that creates a project contract before any research runs. It works with a Codex subscription and no API key, or against open source model APIs, which the docs recommend for sustained runs because of the cache-hit rate. Long autonomous runs mean real token spend regardless of who serves the model.

Free for individuals and companies under $1,000,000 in annual revenue. Cross that line and you need a paid commercial license from Sapient Intelligence. Solo researchers and small teams pay nothing today. Anyone at scale needs to price the license before building on it.

The catch is that this is Fair Source, not open source. You may use and modify it internally, but you may not redistribute, sublicense, or resell it, and the revenue threshold follows your whole company. That is a legal review, not a `pip install`.