HITL is the whole point.

If you've shipped any AI product in the last year, you've felt this: your evals are green, your demo works, and you have no idea whether a real human running your agent in production gets the answer they actually wanted.

You ship something on Tuesday — an agent, an LLM-generated workflow, half a flow that depends on a model holding the line. By Thursday you need someone outside your bubble to use it, on video, with their voice in the room. You have nowhere to send them.

Eval frameworks help, but evals can't tell you whether your output reads as condescending. AI red-teaming services cost a month's runway. User-testing platforms send you panelists who don't ship anything themselves and answer in adjectives. Asking on Twitter gets you two people who are nice to you and one who's grinding an axe.

So you ask your friends. You feel bad about it on the second ask. By the fourth ask you stop.

// 00 The name says what it does.

Hitlooper = HITL (human in the loop) + the loop itself. The first four letters of the wordmark are the acronym you'd write on a whiteboard if you were drawing your AI pipeline.

// 01 The problem isn't supply.

There are thousands of people on the internet right now who would happily spend half an hour inside your product. They'd narrate. They'd find things. They'd write you a structured note about what's broken and what isn't.

What they want is the same thing back, for the same kind of work they shipped last week. They're not chasing $50. They're chasing a market for testing time. Money has to be involved — because friends-helping-friends doesn't scale past your first ten — but money on its own isn't the thing.

// 02 The deposit closes the loop.

So you charge the requester. That works once. They pay, the worker gets paid, you take a fee. Now you've built a freelance marketplace and you'll spend the next year competing with Upwork.

Or: you make the deposit refundable, conditional on the requester paying it forward. The marketplace becomes a different kind of object. Not a labor market. A reciprocity engine. People claim work knowing the requester is on the hook to claim work themselves in 30 days. Every project pulls another project into existence.

The 15% is what lets us run it. The other 85% you either get back or you've decided to fund someone else's worker on purpose. Both outcomes are fine. The mechanism is fair either way.

// 03 Honesty is a UX choice.

You'll notice we say $50 instead of starting at $50. We say 15% instead of transparent low fees. We say 72 hours instead of fast turnaround. There are no badges to earn by "engaging." There is no streak. There is no notification you can't turn off.

This is on purpose. Builders trust software that tells them the math. Builders distrust software that pretends complexity is "simplicity." We're going to keep being boring about this, because boring is what works.

// 04 What this is not.

We're not a place to recruit your next QA hire. We're not a product-management platform. We're not building toward "enterprise tier." We're not going to add a chat feature. We're not adding gamification. The loop is the whole product.

If we ever start sending you "your weekly digest of Hitlooper highlights," it'll be because we failed. Tell us.

// 05 What it might become.

Right now there are six templates. There will probably be more, but only when adding one makes some category of work claim-able that wasn't claim-able before. Not for variety. Not for SEO. Not because a sales person asked.

If you have a template you wish existed, write us. Use the contact link. Be specific.

That's the whole thing. Sign in, post your first $25 project. The loop starts on Tuesday.