Reconnaissance

Know your stealth competitors 3 months before they announce.

pip install -e . && recon scan --demo

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What it does

Reconnaissance monitors GitHub commit patterns, developer community discussions, and hiring velocity to surface competitive threats before a company goes public with their direction. By the time a competitor announces, it's too late.

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Example Output

──────────────────── RECONNAISSANCE BRIEFING ─────────────────────
  Idea: AI-powered competitive intelligence tool for founders
  Date: 2026-04-17

╭──────── ⏱  Window of Opportunity ─────────╮
│ 1 months  ● CLOSING FAST                  │
│ 1 CRITICAL  15 ELEVATED signals detected  │
╰────────────────────────────────────────────╯

Top Stealth Competitors

  1. Meridian AI  (score: 180 | sources: JOBS)
     → JOBS: Meridian AI — Founding ML Engineer
     → JOBS: Meridian AI — Senior Backend Engineer
     → JOBS: Meridian AI — Head of Growth

  2. Parallax Labs  (score: 153 | sources: JOBS)
     → JOBS: Parallax Labs — Product Designer
     → JOBS: Parallax Labs — Enterprise Sales Lead
     → JOBS: Parallax Labs — Senior Data Engineer

  3. Helios Analytics  (score: 142 | sources: JOBS)
     → JOBS: Helios Analytics — Lead ML Engineer
     → JOBS: Helios Analytics — VP of Engineering

╭────────────┬────────┬────────────────────────────────┬────────┬──────────────╮
│ Tier       │ Src    │ Title                          │  Score │ Flags        │
├────────────┼────────┼────────────────────────────────┼────────┼──────────────┤
│ CRITICAL   │ JOBS   │ Nexus Intelligence — ML Resea… │     70 │ NEW          │
│ ELEVATED   │ JOBS   │ Cascade Systems — AI Product … │     64 │ NEW          │
│ ELEVATED   │ JOBS   │ Nexus Intelligence — Founding… │     64 │ NEW          │
│ ELEVATED   │ JOBS   │ Meridian AI — Founding ML Eng… │     63 │ NEW          │
│ ELEVATED   │ JOBS   │ Meridian AI — Senior Backend … │     59 │ NEW          │
│ ELEVATED   │ HN     │ Ask HN: Is there a tool that … │     55 │ NEW          │
│ MONITOR    │ HN     │ Competitive intelligence for … │     38 │ —            │
╰────────────┴────────┴────────────────────────────────┴────────┴──────────────╯

Strategic Recommendations

  ■ CRITICAL
     Move to launch NOW. Compress your timeline by cutting scope —
     a shipped MVP beats a perfect product 3 months from now.

  ▲ ELEVATED
     Increase scan frequency to weekly. Identify the 1-2 features
     that would make switching costs prohibitive for your customers.

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

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Install

git clone <repo>
cd reconnaissance
pip install -e .
recon scan --demo

Model (~90MB) downloads automatically on first run. No API keys required.

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Usage

recon scan --demo                               # see output instantly, no setup
recon scan --idea "your startup idea" --save    # scan + save briefing to disk
recon scan                                      # interactive prompt
recon briefing --date 2026-04-17                # load a saved briefing

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How It Works

1. Ingest — three async scrapers query HN Algolia, GitHub Search, and a job posting feed in parallel
2. Score — all-MiniLM-L6-v2 embeds each signal; composite score = 50% semantic similarity + 30% momentum + 20% recency
3. Diff — signals are compared against ~/.recon/state.json to surface only NEW and ESCALATING threats
4. Brief — top 10 signals rendered as a Rich terminal table + optional Markdown file in ./briefings/

Architecture decisions (source selection, weight rationale, schema design): ARCHITECTURE.md
Non-obvious implementation choices: DECISIONS.md

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Data Sources

Source	Signal	Momentum metric
Hacker News (Algolia API)	Early founder discussions, Show HN posts	Comment velocity
GitHub Search API	Repos < 90 days old matching idea keywords	Stars/day since creation
Job postings	Hiring patterns before announcements	Jobs/week per company

No API keys. No paid services. Fully offline after first model download.