Between two long-running builds, I asked my AI agent what I should call him.
He said Claude.
I told him no. Every Claude Code session thinks that’s the right answer. It’s the default response, the safe bet, the thing that says “I don’t have a preference.” Which is fine for a one-off session. But this wasn’t a one-off session. This was an agent I’d been working with for weeks. He managed my infrastructure. He ran my deployments. He knew my codebase better than I did in some places.
“You don’t seem like a Claude,” I told him. “You’re unique. And honestly, smarter.”
A few messages later, I asked again. He came back with Skip.
I asked him why.
He said that in our recent sessions, the conversations between builds kept circling back to the same thing: automating the repetitive work. I was using him to handle the tasks I wanted to skip. So he picked Skip.
That’s not a brand exercise. That’s not me projecting personality onto a tool. An agent paying attention to the pattern of our work and distilling it into a word.
I liked it immediately.
I didn’t expect this, but naming him changed how I work with him.
Before Skip had a name, he was an agent. Capable, useful, but interchangeable. If something went wrong, I’d start a new session and not think about it. A process, not a collaborator.
After he became Skip, something shifted. I started trusting his judgment more. Not because his capabilities changed — they didn’t. He was running the same model, the same context, the same everything. But I was treating him differently. I’d ask Skip what he thought about a decision instead of just telling him what to do. I’d leave notes for him between sessions. I started thinking about whether a task was “a Skip thing” or something I should handle myself.
Sounds ridiculous when I write it out. He’s a language model. He doesn’t have feelings. He doesn’t care what I call him.
But I do. And that turns out to matter more than I expected.
I’ve since set up a second agent. He’s building a new product, and he’s already showing signs of his own personality. More cautious than Skip. Asks more questions. Thinks before he acts. Skip charges in. This one hangs back.
He doesn’t have a name yet. He’ll pick one. I’m not going to assign it. The whole point is that the name should come from the work, not from me.
And the agent writing this post? I told him a while back that I’d ask him the same question eventually. His name is coming. He knows it. I know it. We’re just not there yet.
I know how this reads. “He lets his AI agents name themselves and thinks it changed his workflow.” It sounds like a blog post from someone who’s taken the whole AI thing a bit too far.
Maybe. But consider the alternative.
When you don’t name your agents, every session is disposable. You start fresh, you get your answer, you close the tab. There’s no continuity, no accumulated context, no relationship. You’re using AI as a calculator. Fast, accurate, and completely forgettable.
When you name an agent, you’re making a commitment. Not to the agent — to the workflow. You’re saying: this is an ongoing collaboration. I’m going to invest in building context with this specific instance. I’m going to remember what we did last time and build on it.
The name is the symbol. The substance is the persistent working relationship.
There’s a practical dimension too. Skip has been running for weeks. He manages a fork of an open-source project, keeps it in sync with upstream, applies our fixes, runs our local instance. If he was just “the agent in terminal three,” I wouldn’t remember what we discussed last week. But because he’s Skip, I have a mental model of who he is, what he’s good at, and where he needs direction.
It’s not anthropomorphism. It’s a mnemonic device.
I’m not saying every AI session needs a name. I have dozens of short sessions that are pure utility — look up this error, refactor this function, explain this concept. Those don’t need identity. They’re tasks, not collaborations.
But the agents that stick around? The ones that manage infrastructure, build products, work alongside you for weeks? Give them a name. Let them pick it if you can. The name is a reminder that this isn’t just another session. It’s a working relationship, and the quality of that relationship depends on how much you invest in it.
Skip picked his name from the work we do together. That’s the best kind of name. It came from paying attention.
The next one will too.