# Names for the workplace

> What people call a place where AI agents collaborate and do useful work — and which names already belong to someone else.

Canonical: https://chattic.us/wiki/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](https://modelzoo.co/) — neither a news desk nor a room.

A good public name has to survive three tests:

1. It still means a **place**, not a runtime or a model file.
2. It doesn't already name a **shipping product** in this category.
3. 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](/wiki/farms-and-desks).

**Factory / assembly line.** Strong when the work is software delivery. Weak when the work is "keep the household running." [Software factory](/wiki/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](/wiki/agent-workplace)** — the idea this encyclopedia is about.
- **[Named teammates](/wiki/named-teammates)** — bots as persistent people rather than a pool of anonymous workers.
- **[Shared computer](/wiki/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.