A Message from the Product and Dev Teams Before We Begin 2026:
In 2025 we learned what building for the next mental model feels like.
LLMs got everyone used to expect a certain thing from AI. say something, get it back. context persists within a session. it's familiar, it's what people know.
Core doesn't work that way. and honestly, nothing alive does either.
Core is cognitive architecture. It traverses concept spaces, evolves pathfinding strategies, forms relationships between ideas through reinforcement and feedback. decay is part of it, information that isn't reinforced fades but so is concept formation, competitive strategy selection and so on. It extracts meaning and not transcripts.
We took as much inspiration as we could from living systems. and living systems don't regurgitate training data. that's not a bug, that's how learning actually happens.
the gap isn't anyone's fault. years of LLM usage just built a certain habit; say it once, retrieve it within the session, no feedback loop, just dump and query. Core asks something different. you're not querying, you're teaching. same question gets better answers, not identical ones. corrections matter. reinforcement matters.
In the past six months, we noticed that our UI worked great for advanced users who get those concepts from the get-go. for everyone else, there's a learning curve we're still helping with and adding guides to tackle. on top of that, UI (Factory) data APIs we added free of charge as a closed beta perk sometimes returned nothing and MCPs have their own flaws, things outside our control that still hit the UX. builders with their own custom stable data feeds don't have that problem.
What worked the most for a certain demographic: builders who abstract the complexity, feed their own data, don't ask end users to prompt directly.
@EclipticaOS is the first to go semi-public and hit a few thousand users in beta doing exactly that.
In a nutshell: every app built on rei adds indirect users who get the benefits without the learning curve. the infra doesn't need to be understood by everyone to be useful.
Beyond agentic core and mental models, learning curves and so on, the goal is fully capable digital entities that learn conceptually. right now Core handles reasoning really well. conceptual learning, numerical accuracy, things LLMs fumble. with Core Abstraction
(separate from the agentic Core on the frontend/API), builders can plug in external knowledge bases that are task-specific.
reasoning and retrieval without polluting your agent's brain. Abstraction is an intelligence layer for all AI, beyond agentic systems and text interfaces. it's destined to give builders complete freedom.
We put all our energy into reasoning evolution and learning. that's much more challenging and will always be what sets us apart. task-specific retrieval and db integration ship with abstraction. the foundation had to come first.
There's a reason AI feels like it's consolidating around a few big players. the models are massive, the compute is getting expensive, hardware costs are out of hand and if you're not running your own data center you're paying someone who is. we didn't want to play that game. Core is modular. we're aiming at making it possible to run on much less hardware than your average model even 10 versions away from this one. the goal was always to build something powerful that doesn't need billions to keep running.
Holiday season just ended, we're back to work. It's been humbling. Shipping something completely new isn't always obvious to get right. thank you for sticking around, it means the world to us. Happy New Year.