# Nobody agrees what to call this

> Factory, farm, zoo, reactor — a category is forming around workplaces where agents collaborate and do useful work. The pictures overlap. The trademarks don't.

Published 2026-09-04

Canonical: https://chattic.us/agent-zoo/nobody-agrees/

A product category is forming in real time, and the industry has not settled on a word for it. Persistent multi-agent workplaces: named bots that hold jobs, share a computer, run in the background, and get useful work done together. One picture of the same idea is a reactor chamber. The thing itself is stable; the jargon is still moving.

There's something great about catching a field before it's settled on its nouns. People keep reaching for factories, farms, desks, control rooms, assembly lines — industrial metaphors every one, because the closest thing anybody has to a mental model for "software that holds down a job" is a place where work happens. Software factory is the strongest of them, and it's already a product name. Bot farm is vivid, and it already means spam. Model zoo is a [catalog of trained weights](https://modelzoo.co/).

This desk is **Agent Zoo**. That's Chatticus's name for covering the category, ourselves included. It's a news desk, not a catalog of models.

Chatticus's own picture is named teammates at durable desks on one shared computer. We'll say **agent farm** when we want the agricultural metaphor. We'll write about the factory *idea* when the work is spec, branch, review, merge. And we'll name vendors when they ship something that changes how a farm actually runs — those go in dated posts on this desk.

The noun will keep moving. If you're trying to work out whether this thing is a chatbot, a coding agent, or a digital employee, start from the workplace: a place that persists, a roster that stays named, and work that outlasts a session. That is the beat.

## Related wiki

- [Names for the workplace](/wiki/names-for-the-workplace/)
- [Agent workplace](/wiki/agent-workplace/)