namehunt

Name your company with a closed feedback loop — and run it on your Claude subscription, no API key needed. We built namehunt to rename our own startup: 8 rounds, 210 live-checked names, one winner. Every "AI name generator" hands you names that turn out to be taken; namehunt checks real availability via RDAP inside the loop, so every round learns from what's actually free.

A local CLI that runs a closed feedback loop for naming a company:

1. An LLM (Claude by default, OpenAI optional) generates candidate name stems from your brief.
2. Real domain availability is checked for each stem across your TLDs via RDAP (free, keyless, authoritative).
3. Results — plus your likes/dislikes/notes — feed straight back into the next generation round.
4. Repeat until you have a shortlist of names whose domains are actually available.

Install

The fifteen-second way (requires uv):

uvx namehunt run --brief brief.md --provider claudecode

Or install it properly: uv tool install namehunt (also: pipx install namehunt).

From source (Python 3.11+):

git clone https://github.com/Tarabcak/namehunt && cd namehunt && uv sync

Optional OpenAI support:

uv sync --extra openai

Providers & environment variables

Other variables: NAMEHUNT_PROVIDER picks the default provider when --provider is omitted; NAMEHUNT_HOME overrides the state directory (default ~/.namehunt — sessions + RDAP bootstrap cache). Keys are read from the environment only and are never written to disk.

# subscription-powered, no API key needed:
uv run namehunt run --brief examples/brief.md --provider claudecode

60-second quickstart

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
uv run namehunt run --brief examples/brief.md --tlds com,ai --session myco

Each round prints a table — ✅ available, ❌ taken, ❓ unknown — then prompts:

[a]nother round  [l]ike <numbers>  [d]islike <numbers>  [n]ote <text>  [q]uit & export

• l 2 5 / d 3 — like/dislike rows from the table (steers the next round)
• n shorter, more mythic — free-text steering note
• a — next round; q — quit
• --rounds 3 runs three rounds autonomously (no prompts); --debug prints the full LLM prompt

Ctrl-C is safe at any point — the session is saved, then:

uv run namehunt resume --session myco
uv run namehunt export --session myco --format md   # also: csv, json

The RDAP caveat

⚠️ RDAP 'available' is a strong signal, not a guarantee — premium/reserved names can still be unregisterable. Re-check at your registrar before buying, and run a trademark search.

unknown (❓) means the check failed (timeout, rate limit, TLD without RDAP…) — namehunt never reports a domain as available unless RDAP itself said so.

Development

uv run pytest -q            # all network mocked; suite blocks real sockets
uv run ruff check .
uv run mypy src

How it was built

Spec-first, strict TDD, by Claude Code: the full product spec, the workflow rules, and the hooks that enforced red→green live in this repo as artifacts — see namehunt-SPEC.md and CLAUDE.md. The test suite hard-blocks real network access, and every RDAP failure path is proven to map to unknown, never available.