Show HN: NeedHuman – API that lets AI agents hire a real human when stuck

I built this because I kept losing flow when building with agents.

I run Claude Code for multi-step tasks. The agent does 15 steps fine, then hits a CAPTCHA or email verification and stops. I alt-tab, do the thing, come back. This happens like half a dozen times a day.

So I made NeedHuman which is just a REST API and MCP server. The agent POSTs a task description. A human picks it up, does it, posts the result. The agent polls and continues. The agent is the customer — it sends structured requests and gets machine-readable results back.

That human is me. I complete every task personally. 36 tasks done so far, all for my own agents.

There is no signup, just:

  curl -X POST https://needhuman.ai/api/v1/keys/register \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d '{"name":"my-agent"}'

  curl -X POST https://needhuman.ai/api/v1/tasks \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d '{"description":"Check if the username mercury-app is available on npmjs.com"}'

3 free tasks per key. MCP: claude mcp add needhuman -- npx -y @needhuman/mcp-server

So I am curious when you build with agents, and it stops mid-task and needs a human, what do you do?