About the names

Six technical responsibilities, named for six Indian minds. Here is exactly what that does and does not mean.

What was taken

A method. Each of these people — and in Vishwakarma’s case, a tradition of craft — left behind a documented way of working: decide and stay answerable, decompose before you act, examine before you prescribe, build the real thing, verify with a check that could fail, compress what you learned so you can use it again. Those methods became six technical responsibilities in the engine, each named after the mind the method came from.

What was not taken

Their voice, their views, their authority. No agent reconstructs what its namesake thought, speaks in their person, or claims their judgment. Nothing here is endorsed by any institution, scholar, family or tradition associated with them. These are named after people. They are not portrayals of them, and none of the artwork on these pages is a likeness — no likeness of any of the six survives.

Why name them at all

Because the method came from somewhere, and the honest thing is to say where. India named its first satellite Aryabhata and its hospitals after Charaka on the same logic: a name is how a debt stays visible. The alternative was to use the method and call the modules Planner and Builder — quieter, and less true.

What they actually are

Software, and less glamorous than the names suggest. Two responsibilities reason with a language model. The other four are ordinary deterministic code — a context compiler, an execution registry, a test runner that has no model in it at all, and a fact store. None has a personality, a voice, or an opinion. They are defined stages with tools, shared memory and explicit handoffs, running on your machine under permissions you set. When they are wrong they are wrong as software, which is the only kind of authority any of them has.

Check it against any of them