I'm unsure.

The example in the docs of improving nanochat is iterative. It's a looped process in one thing altering a second thing.

What would be recursive is raven updating raven to make it better at doing things. For what I picture as RSI the important part would be that it's able to make itself better at doing things and better at improving itself.

Now there's an "evolver" part that improves the harness over time but I don't know how far that goes or what scope it has to update things.

I guess it's that if you have a function called "optimise" that takes functions and makes them better, calling optimise(my_process) is iterative regardless of how many times you do it. Calling optimise(optimise) is inherently different.