# Foundry Overview

> Foundry is the persistent orchestration layer for AI-assisted software development. It is a control plane that externalizes memory, intent, and control…

Source: https://bifrost5.com/foundry/docs/overview/

# What is Foundry?

Information

Open source is free and complete locally. Production-Grade adds the following.

- Control runs from web, mobile, terminal or chat
- Encrypted backup, so no run is lost
- Secure previews before you merge
- Your own AI tool, plus support with response times

[See editions](/foundry/docs/editions)

Foundry is the **persistent orchestration layer for AI-assisted software development**. It is a control plane that externalizes memory, intent, and control so work can continue across interruptions, sleep, crashes, or session loss.

## The Problem

When you chain AI agents on long, multi-day coding projects:

- **Context degrades**: agents drift and forget earlier context

- **Recovery is manual**: halts and crashes require human intervention to resume

- **Costs spiral**: without validation, agents make redundant calls and burn tokens

- **No audit trail**: you can't see what happened or why it failed

## The Solution

Foundry acts as a **deterministic supervisor** for agentic chains. It orchestrates tasks, validates outputs (local checks first, AI only when needed), maintains persistent state in DragonflyDB, and keeps costs bounded. You get a **"set it and forget it"** workflow: provide boilerplates, tasks, and a goal; Foundry runs until the goal is met or tasks are exhausted.

## The Three Pillars

- **You Control the Scope**: Define goals, enqueue tasks with acceptance criteria, provide boilerplate code. Foundry never invents scope.

- **Foundry Executes Reliably**: Tasks run sequentially in an isolated sandbox. Each output is validated. State persists after every step. On failure: auto-retry with feedback, or block and wait for your input.

- **Cost-Optimized by Design**: Routine validation runs locally (no API cost). Session reuse reduces tokens across iterations. AI agents only handle true reasoning.

## Status

- **Public Beta**: core control loop and state persistence are stable

- **MIT**: open source; **BYOK** (bring your own provider keys)