AGPL-3.0 License with Visible Attribution Requirement
Copyright (c) 2026 Ocean Bennett
Hematite — a local AI coding harness engineered specifically for single-GPU consumer
hardware, tested and developed on an NVIDIA RTX 4070 (12 GB VRAM) — including its
agent harness architecture, hybrid RAG retrieval system (The Vein), terminal TUI,
tool registry, workflow mode engine, context compaction system, recovery recipe layer,
swarm orchestration, hardware-aware GPU runtime, and all source code in this repository
— is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0, with the additional
visible attribution requirement below.
Hematite is purpose-built for the constraint that matters in practice: one local GPU,
one coding model, and one co-resident text embedding model — all running simultaneously
on a single consumer GPU with no cloud, no per-token billing, and no pretending that a
10 GB consumer card is a cloud worker fleet. The dual-model architecture (coding model
+ embedding model on the same GPU for hybrid semantic retrieval) is a core part of what
makes Hematite distinct. That architecture — local-first, hardware-honest, dual-model,
operator-visible — is the core of what this project is.
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ADDITIONAL TERM (permitted under AGPL-3.0 Section 7):
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Any tool, plugin, application, or service that uses, derives from, or is
substantially built upon this codebase or its architecture must include a visible
credit in one or more of the following locations:
- The tool's public-facing README or documentation
- The tool's in-app about panel or credits screen
- The tool's store page, landing page, or repository description
The credit must read, at minimum:
"Built on Hematite by Ocean Bennett
(https://github.com/undergroundrap/hematite-cli)"
or an equivalent that names Ocean Bennett and links to this repository.
This requirement applies regardless of how substantially the code was modified.
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Core license terms:
1. Attribution: Retain this copyright notice and the visible credit above in
any derivative work, fork, or project that uses Hematite or its architecture.
2. Copyleft: Derivative works must be released under AGPL-3.0. You may not
incorporate this code into a closed-source tool or product.
3. Network use: If you run a modified version as a hosted or networked service
(e.g., a cloud-based AI coding assistant built on Hematite's harness), you
must make the complete modified source code publicly available. Running a
hosted service counts as distribution.
4. Hardware intent: Hematite is designed around single-GPU consumer hardware
running a dual-model configuration (one coding model, one embedding model).
If you adapt it for multi-GPU, cloud-hosted, or enterprise-scale deployments,
the copyleft and attribution terms above still apply in full.
5. Commercial use by the original author: Ocean Bennett, as copyright holder,
reserves the right to release commercial versions of this software under
separate licensing terms, including custom builds for specific hardware
configurations or enterprise deployments. This does not affect the open-source
rights granted to the community under this license.
Full AGPL-3.0 license text: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html