RSI (Recursive Self-Improvement) Hats

RSI used to mean one thing: the wrist. In 2026 it quietly acquired a second meaning, and the people who use it that way are not talking about typing posture. Recursive self-improvement is the point where a model starts contributing to the making of the next model, and it stopped being a thought experiment this year. OpenAI's GPT-5.3-Codex release notes say earlier versions of the model were instrumental in creating it, helping debug its own training runs. Anthropic reports Claude writing more than four fifths of the code merged into Anthropic's codebase. Google's AlphaEvolve is deployed inside Google's own infrastructure, recovering compute and speeding up training for the next generation of models, which will in turn make AlphaEvolve better at it. The gap between frontier releases went from most of a year to a few weeks. These hats take the acronym at face value and let the collision do the work. Two are the bare three letters, set once as a blunt badge and once as something closer to a department nameplate. The others are for explaining yourself at the physiotherapist. Embroidered, $29.99, and improving recursively.