How OFM works

The architecture behind Open Free Max — a native Tauri shell that drives official CLIs through an embedded PTY, with a local orchestration engine.

OFM is a thin native shell over the official agent CLIs. Understanding the architecture explains why it’s light, durable, and able to run bulk jobs autonomously.

The shell: Tauri, not Electron

OFM is built on Tauri 2. The UI runs in your operating system’s own WebView; the core is a small Rust binary. There is no bundled Chromium and no VS Code extension host, which is where Electron IDEs spend most of their memory. The result is a native app that launches fast and uses up to 200× less RAM.

The agents: a real PTY, real interactive mode

When you start a session, OFM launches the official CLI (claude, codex, …) inside an embedded pseudo-terminal (PTY) and streams its real stdin/stdout to a terminal view. You are driving the actual binary — the same one you’d run in a shell — in interactive mode. OFM never reimplements the agent and never speaks to it through an SDK or headless flag. See Subscription vs API.

State lives where it belongs

OFM keeps a deliberately tiny amount of state:

• A session map (which sessions are open) — so it can resume each tab via the CLI’s own --resume. Transcripts stay in the CLI’s store, never OFM’s. See Session persistence.
• Settings, recent workspaces, and Mission Control rules/audit.
• For Plan, a small spool of campaigns and workers (never the thousands of work units — those are re-enumerated from their source).

The engine: a local daemon

The Rust core runs a single periodic loop (a heartbeat). Because the process survives any individual agent session, OFM acts as a local daemon — exactly what Plan needs to carry a long batch across crashes, reboots and token-limit windows without anything to keep alive in a fragile session.

How a confirmation is handled

OFM reads the agent’s rendered screen (never a hidden side-channel) to detect when it’s waiting for a yes/no. A rules engine can auto-answer safe, repetitive confirmations; everything else lands in the unified queue for a human. The only action OFM ever takes on an agent is a keystroke — exactly what a human would type.