Hansel

Hansel is a stealth-mode social startup: an AI companion delivered over SMS, currently in private alpha.

The part worth sharing is the agent framework, built so non-engineers can configure and tune the product. In a companion product, behavior iteration is the core product work, and it can’t bottleneck on an engineer. There’s a whole pipeline for it:

• Behavior in markdown, machinery in code. Tone, memory rules, interaction patterns and goal setting are plain markdown files anyone can edit and roll back. Database, scoring, scheduling and auth are code.
• Rulesets versioned per user. Every user is pinned to a ruleset version and a model. Test a behavioral change by putting yourself on the new version in production while everyone else stays put.
• Every turn traced. Each conversation turn records exactly what went into the model’s context: which rules, which memories, how much history. When the companion says something off, you can see why and fix the right file.
• Structure over instructions. Where behavior must be guaranteed, the code controls what gets loaded. Scoring is deterministic code the model can read but never compute.

Status: Private alpha, iterating