The whiteboard in Justin's office wasn't supposed to exist. The factory had banished whiteboards from conference rooms months ago—replaced by terminals, replaced by agents, replaced by the understanding that if you needed to draw a diagram, you should describe it and let the system draw it for you. But Justin kept one in his office, a small one, the kind you'd mount in a dorm room to track whose turn it was to buy milk.
On it he had drawn a phase portrait. Not a particularly rigorous one—more of a sketch, really. Curved arrows spiraling inward toward a single point. The kind of drawing you'd find in a first-year dynamical systems textbook, chapter three, right after they introduce the concept of stability.
"An attractor," Justin said, tapping the convergence point with a dry-erase marker, "is a state toward which a system evolves over time. Drop a ball in a bowl, and it settles at the bottom. The bottom is the attractor. The ball's path is the trajectory. The bowl is the phase space."
Jay and Navan were sitting on the small couch that didn't quite fit the office. It was a Friday afternoon. The kind of afternoon where serious decisions get made because everyone is too tired to overthink them.
"The CLI is called rocks right now," Jay said. "Which is... fine."
"It's bad," Navan said flatly.
"It's not great," Jay amended.
Justin drew another spiral on the whiteboard. This one was messier, the trajectory wobbling chaotically before it converged. "What the tool does," he said, "is take a goal and let agents iterate on it. They're noisy. They make mistakes. They overwrite each other's work sometimes. But the loop—interview, design, sprint, implement, assess—the loop corrects. Each pass gets closer. The system converges."
"Like a strange attractor?" Navan asked. He had his notebook open. Jay noticed he was sketching the phase portrait by hand, mirroring Justin's drawing.
"Not quite strange. Strange attractors are fractal, never quite repeating. This is more like a fixed-point attractor or a limit cycle. The system has a goal state. It approaches that state. It reaches it." Justin paused. "In dynamical systems, the name for that goal state is the attractor."
The word hung in the air. Jay turned it over. Attractor. A state the system evolves toward. That was exactly what the tool did. You defined a goal—the attractor state—and the agents converged on it.
"Agate," Justin said.
Navan looked up from his notebook. "Like the rock?"
"Like the first two letters of 'attractor,' plus a nod to the layers. Have you ever looked at an agate cross-section? Bands of order emerging from geological chaos. Pattern from noise."
Jay pulled up the CLI's main.go in his editor. He highlighted the string "rocks" and let his cursor hover there.
"Agate," he repeated, and then he typed it.
The rename was a single commit. The metaphor would take considerably longer to unpack.
The detail about Navan sketching the phase portrait by hand in his physical notebook while they're literally building software that generates software... layers on layers.