My payment agent is named George, not stripe-agent

Please disclose AI use, or the name of your "writing agent" at least, so I can know to skip the article. So much "it's not X it's Y" in this post, I'm losing it.

> This isn’t whimsy; it’s how I remember who the work is actually for.

> These aren’t chatbots with personalities; they’re specialized configurations I invoke by name to focus my intent.

> That’s when I realized the naming wasn’t a quirk. It was a practice.

It is a quirk

> I’m not asking for a generic security scan. I’m saying that I need to look for what I missed.

You aren't asking for a generic security scan? It seems like you're asking for a generic security scan.

> I need to look for what I missed. I need to find the secret traveling farther than it should, the data leaking where it shouldn’t, the assumption I made that an attacker won’t make. I need to be paranoid on behalf of the users whose data and trust I’m protecting.

> The names aren’t just labels. They’re invocations. They shape my intent before the work even starts.

They are just labels.

I appreciate the writer actually taking the time to explain why `george`. I have worked in some projects where some thing-a-majing or another is called `valhalla` or `thor` or something or another but there is no documentation as to why it is called that and the people who were responsible for naming them so have already ridden into the sunset. If I ever meet him, I "just want to talk" to this CTO who named US East region 2 as "eu2".

> The tech industry loves to abstract away the human. Users become “MAUs.” Problems become “pain points.” Customers become “conversions.”

The LLM loves to torture concepts into statements with pithy veneers and three-item. Punctuated. Lists. “Pain points” as an example, really? All of these terms are just more specific than the ones they’re contrasted with, which don’t have much of a human element to them to begin with.

The irony of bemoaning this while AI-mimicking a team of people and getting a computer to write for you in its own voice…

George, Ray, Agatha... Ok As long as you are the only one managing these systems. But the moment you involve other people, this is the worst naming possible.

As the end of the article says, to the author this is more of a "ritual".

I don't know how effective it is, but I can't imagine this would undermine the quality of the output, so if it adds a little bit of humor and human-ness to my workflow, I'm happy to try it out.

> I added Helen to my roster just this week.

I haven't written myself a Claude agent nor a skill nor a plugin yet, but when I do, I'm going to name it well.

As I've been asking Claude to "keep planning criticize ultrathink" very often and repeatedly, maybe I'll make a planning agent, one that helps me shepherd each plan well.

I'd be very curious to see what sort of code / prompting goes in to these agents, and what sort of results you see from them - is the name just a personal reminder, or do the LLM subagents incorporate these philosophies? What sort of behavioral changes do you see from this method?

There are only two unsolved problems in computer science. Cache invalidation and naming things. And off-by-one errors.

It's a good way to name your agents, who do they help/work for... Smart move

Dehumanize humans, and humanize non-humans.

Makes sense to me…

But seriously, naming things is always a sticky wicket.

I tend to name my various devices as characters from Glen Cook’s The Black Company.

My iPhone is Thai Dei, my iPad is Soulcatcher, my Watch is Goblin, and my Mac is Mogaba. It helps me to keep them distinct from my simulators.

If I wanted really crazy names, I’d use Garret P.I. As a source.

> This isn’t whimsy

Uh, yes it is? It's just whimsy with an explanation. Long live descriptive, preferably short, names.

George? IDK