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Show HN: Recursive – AI support agents for small businesses

https://recursive.support
1•alanmcintyre•1h ago
I'm a solo developer who's been writing code for 26 years, mostly consulting work in computational geometry and CAD software these days. A month or two ago I watched a YouTube video about using an AI agent as a resume assistant, and thought it sounded like a fun idea. More importantly, it sounded like something I could actually learn to build quickly.

Around the same time my longest-running client, a small company that makes a SolidWorks plugin, needed a better way to handle technical support. They're a three-person shop--they don't have a support team or an IT team. So I built them a chatbot: Flask backend, Anthropic API, and a hand-curated knowledge base built from their help files, a list of possible error messages I extracted from their code, and transcripts of their training videos.

It worked well enough that the owner was impressed, and that's when it clicked: every small software company has this exact problem. They're too small for Zendesk, too busy to answer the same questions repeatedly, and too niche for generic solutions.

So I turned it into a platform. You give me your documentation--whatever that happens to look like--I build your knowledgebase, stand up an agent on a subdomain of recursive.support, and you embed it on your site with a single iframe tag. No JavaScript SDK, no backend integration.

The part I'm most interested in technically is the self-improvement loop. The agent generates reports that review its conversations, identify gaps and trends, and propose specific knowledge base edits, presented as diffs the business owner can approve or reject individually. It sometimes even suggests fixes and enhancements I roll back into the product to make it better. The goal is that the agent gets measurably better over time without requiring the owner to manually curate anything.

There are five agents running right now: the original client's technical support, a documentation agent for an open-source project I maintain (neat-python), a founding documents Q&A at ask1787.com, the recursive.support visitor agent (dogfooding), and an AI resume agent that circles back to the video that started all of this.

I built ask1787.com, from idea to live deployment, in about nine hours, which is probably the best demo of what the platform can do at this point.

Tech stack: Python, SQLite, ChromaDB, Anthropic API (Claude Haiku & Sonnet), DigitalOcean droplets. Each customer gets an isolated deployment.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the self-improvement loop, or the experience of building a SaaS product as a side project while juggling 50 hours/week of client work.

On the actual business side, I have one paying customer--the original client whose support problem started all of this. Their contract covers most of the hosting costs for the entire platform, which means I can be patient about growth instead of desperate for it.

Fair warning: the product is live but early. So far my traffic consists mostly of people asking the agent to make them a hot anime girlfriend, so there's clearly some product-market fit work left to do.

The Ricoh Printing Experience

https://eidel.io/the-ricoh-printing-experience/
1•olieidel•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Agentpriv – Sudo for AI Agents

https://github.com/nichkej/agentpriv
1•nichkej•2m ago•0 comments

The Ozempic Effect: How McDonald's Is Reinventing Fast Food

https://ariatatrezvalthazar.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-ozempic-effect-how-mcdonalds-is.html
1•Traumen•3m ago•0 comments

I've Disallowed LLMs

https://ylan.segal-family.com/blog/2026/02/17/ive-disallowed-llms/
1•speckx•4m ago•0 comments

Open sourcing the Liveblocks sync engine and dev server

https://liveblocks.io/blog/open-sourcing-the-liveblocks-sync-engine-and-dev-server
3•ctnicholas•4m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Turn any OpenAPI spec into agent-callable skills

https://neutree.ai/projects/openapi-to-skills
1•yz-yu•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A pay-per-request API to search social media posts

https://apidirect.io/
1•joshwaller7•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: VectorNest responsive web-based SVG editor

https://ekrsulov.github.io/vectornest/
2•ekrsulov•7m ago•0 comments

Reddit and Discord users forced to use biometric ID system backed by Palantir

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/roblox-reddit-and-discord-users-compelled-to-use-b...
1•robtherobber•9m ago•0 comments

Detection of Spoilage-Associated Acetic Acid Levels Using a Whole-Cell Biosensor

https://enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1751-7915.70267
1•PaulHoule•9m ago•0 comments

What Cooking Tells Us About AI

https://nik.art/what-cooking-tells-us-about-ai/
2•herbertl•10m ago•0 comments

Extracting Financial Data Using LLMs Without Reading Every Email

https://github.com/brainless/dwata/blob/feature/reverse-template-based-financial-data-extraction/...
1•brainless•11m ago•0 comments

FDA No Longer Warns Against Ineffective Autism Treatments Like Chlorine Dioxide

https://www.propublica.org/article/rfk-jr-fda-removes-autism-treatments-warning
2•hn_acker•11m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Free Windows shell extension for quick .NET assembly inspection

https://github.com/tebjan/AssemblyInformation
1•tebjan•12m ago•0 comments

After Microsoft's AI overreach, Gentoo begins its march away from GitHub

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/linux/after-microsoft-couldnt-keep-its-ai-hands-to-itself-a-noto...
2•stalfosknight•14m ago•0 comments

Experiential Reinforcement Learning

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13949
2•geophile•16m ago•0 comments

If you're always listening to an audiobook, you're not alone

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2026/02/11/audiobook-listening-trends/
1•randycupertino•17m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Mock any HTTP request from DevTools, with AI-generation and zero setup

https://mockstudio.app
1•denyherianto•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Poncho, a general agent harness built for the web

https://github.com/cesr/poncho-ai
2•heycesr•19m ago•0 comments

What determines whether a post gets visibility on Hacker News

1•beratbozkurt0•19m ago•0 comments

Breccia: Single-file, append-only, blob storage with efficient random access

https://github.com/petertodd/breccia/blob/master/DESIGN.md
1•StingyJelly•21m ago•0 comments

Perpetual Calendar

https://www.ochsundjunior.swiss/watches/perpetual-calendar/
2•OJFord•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Air – Open-source black box for AI agents (tamper-evident audit trails)

https://github.com/nostalgicskinco/air-blackbox-gateway
2•shotwellj•24m ago•1 comments

What's a "gig work minimum wage"

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/17/no-piecework/
2•hn_acker•24m ago•0 comments

'No meat on its bones': Federal judge dismisses lawsuit over boneless wings

https://stocks.apple.com/Ax-EAJBvGSy21LBCzYJ7eDA
2•RickJWagner•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Aspara – Open-source ML metrics tracker that stays fast at scale

https://github.com/prednext/aspara
2•tkng•25m ago•0 comments

EFF to Wisconsin Legislature: VPN Bans Are Still a Terrible Idea

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/02/eff-wisconsin-legislature-vpn-bans-are-still-terrible-idea
4•hn_acker•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: TUI cross-platform Python tool for network discovery and port auditing

https://github.com/mennylevinski/network_scanner
1•mennylevinski•26m ago•0 comments

Retrospective: Realms Campaign Setting

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2026/02/retrospective-forgotten-realms-campaign.html
1•speckx•26m ago•0 comments

OpenClaw creator slams Europe's regulations as he moves to the US

https://www.businessinsider.com/openclaw-creator-slams-europe-regulations-move-us-openai-2026-2
5•WarmWash•29m ago•1 comments