I gave the agents names because it made the Workshop easier to use\. Then an audit showed that even I had blurred which identity belonged to which system\.

# Man and Machine: I Gave the Machines Names\. Then I Had to Give Them Jobs\.

![Man and Machine: I Gave the Machines Names\. Then I Had to Give Them Jobs\.](/writing/man-and-machine/i-gave-the-machines-names-then-i-had-to-give-them-jobs/assets/hero.jpg)

That was enough to show me the gap between personality and responsibility\. Steve belongs to the earlier history of the lab and the archive I preserve from it\. Luke is the builder, responsible for prototypes, repositories, and the artefacts that prove a build works\. Jamie has a separate, quiet lane for family use, with its own privacy boundaries\. Oscar is my front door: the one I ask, the one that routes the work, and the one that returns with a useful answer\.

A good handoff now starts with the outcome I want\. Oscar turns it into a bounded brief\. Luke or another specialist does the work with only the context it needs\. A separate check tests the result\. Oscar reconciles what came back, and I keep the decisions that can publish, spend, delete, or control something in the physical world\.

The names still help\. They make the system easier to speak to and easier to remember\. Their real value comes from the job behind each one: one primary responsibility, one source of truth, a clear boundary, and proof I can inspect\.

If I cannot say who owns the work and what finished looks like, I have not assigned the job yet\.

\-dg

\#ManAndMachine \#PersonalAI \#BionicsLab

## Sources

- [Original LinkedIn post](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7508508913634418688/)