Someone on the Discord asked why the tools were named the way they were. The question spawned a thread that ran to ninety messages before any of the team members responded. The community had theories. Most were wrong. Some were creative. One person insisted that CXDB stood for "Claude Xtreme Database" and would not be dissuaded.
Jay finally responded with a numbered list, because Jay responded to most things with numbered lists. The list became the canonical reference, pinned in the #general channel, cited in blog posts, and eventually printed on a T-shirt that Navan ordered for himself.
Attractor. From dynamical systems theory. An attractor is a set of states toward which a system tends to evolve, regardless of starting conditions. The Attractor pipeline takes specifications and, through iterative agent work, converges on working code. The name is not a metaphor. It is a literal description of the mathematical behavior. The pipeline is a dynamical system. The working code is the attractor state. Justin chose this name. He had been reading about strange attractors in chaotic systems and saw the parallel immediately.
Agate. A geological reference. Agate is a banded variety of chalcedony, formed by the slow deposition of silica in volcanic rock cavities. Layer by layer, over time, the structure builds. Agate the tool works the same way: goal, interview, design, sprint, implementation, assessment. Each layer deposits on the last. The convergence is geological. Patient. Inevitable. Also, the tool was previously called "rocks" before the rename, which is itself a geological reference. Justin appreciated the continuity.
Leash. The simplest name. The most direct. Leash wraps AI coding agents in containers, monitors their activity, enforces Cedar policies. It keeps agents contained. Controlled. Safe. Jay suggested the name during a meeting where they were discussing agent sandboxing. "It's a leash," he said, and nobody argued, because the word contained the entire concept with zero ambiguity. Navan noted that it was the only tool name that a non-technical person would immediately understand.
CXDB. Context Database. CX for context, DB for database. The unglamorous name. The practical name. Jay had argued for something more evocative. Navan had suggested "Memoria." Justin had said "it stores context for agents, it's a context database, call it CXDB" and that was the end of the discussion. The name described the function. The function was the name. There was a purity in that which Justin found satisfying and Jay found slightly disappointing.
"The naming convention," Jay wrote in the Discord message, "is that there is no convention. Each name was chosen for a different reason. Attractor is mathematical. Agate is geological. Leash is functional. CXDB is literal. What they have in common is that each name was the first name that felt exactly right, and once a name feels right, you stop looking."
Navan added a follow-up message: "Also, Rocks was a better name than Agate, and I will die on this hill."
Justin added a single emoji in response. A rock. It was the only emoji anyone had ever seen him use.
"Each name was the first name that felt exactly right, and once a name feels right, you stop looking." That's the entire philosophy of naming in one sentence and nobody has ever said it better.