Names for the workplace
People building agent systems keep reaching for the same physical pictures: a factory, a farm, a desk, a control room, an assembly line. The pictures overlap. The trademarks do not.
This note is a map of ideas. Individual vendors live in our internal landscape notes. Here we care about the metaphor, whether it still means a place to work, and whether saying it in public would sound like we're describing someone else's product.
The naming problem
"Agent workplace" is accurate and slightly dull. "Bot farm" is vivid and already means spam. "Software factory" is the right picture for compile-review-merge and the wrong picture for a household computer. "Model zoo" is a research catalog of neural weights — neither a news desk nor a room.
A good public name has to survive three tests:
- It still means a place, not a runtime or a model file.
- It doesn't already name a shipping product in this category.
- It doesn't already mean something ugly (spam farms, unattended botnets).
Pictures that still mean a place
Workplace / desk. The least fashionable and the most honest. A desk implies persistence, a person (or bot) who sits there, and work that outlasts a session. Chatticus uses this internally as farms and desks.
Factory / assembly line. Strong when the work is software delivery. Weak when the work is "keep the household running." Software factory is the idea; several vendors already own the word as a product name.
Farm. A collection of specialized workers rather than one hero agent. In public, prefer agent farm over bot farm. The latter is an abuse term.
Control room. Humans watch; agents act. Good for operations, easy to over-promise as a "command center."
Reactor chamber (our research prompt). Vivid, unclaimed as a product name, slightly sci-fi. Better as a picture of the workplace than as the product noun.
Pictures that mean something else
| Phrase | What it usually means | Use in public? |
|---|---|---|
| Model zoo | Catalog of trained weights | No — jargon, and it collides with our Agent Zoo news desk |
| Agent OS / runtime / harness | Infrastructure under the workplace | No — not a place |
| Studio | Playground or IDE skin | Rarely — sounds like a toy |
| Foundry | Often a cloud vendor's platform name | No, unqualified |
| Swarm / hive | Many agents, weak persistence | No — wrong picture for named teammates |
How Chatticus splits the words
- Agent workplace — the idea this encyclopedia is about.
- Named teammates — bots as persistent people rather than a pool of anonymous workers.
- Shared computer — one Linux workplace per organization.
- Agent Zoo — the news desk that covers this category. Not a model catalog.
When a vendor's product name is the same as an idea we care about, we write about the idea here and leave the product page in the internal wiki.