Item — HN Reader

Karpathy has a good ear for naming things.

"Claw" captures what the existing terminology missed, these aren't agents with more tools (maybe even the opposite), they're persistent processes with scheduling and inter-agent communication that happen to use LLMs for reasoning.

6 comments

How does "claw" capture this? Other than being derived from a product with this name, the word "claw" doesn't seem to connect to persistence, scheduling, or inter-agent communication at all.

Does he?

Claw is a terrible name for a basic product which is Claude code in a loop (cron job).

This whole hype cycle is absurd and ridiculous for what is a really basic product full of security holes and entirely vibe coded.

The name won’t stick and when Apple or someone releases a polished version which consumers actually use in two years, I guarantee it won’t be called “iClaw”

He didn't name it though, Peter Steinberger did. (Kinda.)

I also like the callback - not sure if it's intentional - to Stross's "Lobsters" (short story that turned into the novel Accelerando).

Why do we always have to come up with the stupidest names for things. Claw was a play on Claude, is all. Granted, I don’t have a better one at hand, but that it has to be Claw of all things…

The real-world cyberpunk dystopia won’t come with cool company names like Arasaka, Sense/Net, or Ono-Sendai. Instead we get childlike names with lots of vowels and alliteration.

The name still kinda reminds me of the self replicating murder drones from Screemers that would leep out from the ground and chop your head off. ;-)

Except Phillip K Dick calls the murder bots in Second Variety claws already so there's prior art right from the master of cyberpunk.

Better to be a claw than a skinjob!

I am reading a book called Accelerando (highly recommended), and there is a play on a lobsters collective uploaded to the cloud. Claws reminded me of that - not sure it was an intentional reference tho!

> I don’t have a better one at hand

Perfect is the enemy of good. Claw is good enough. And perhaps there is utility to neologisms being silly. It conveys that the namespace is vacant.

The name fits since it will claw all your personal data and files and send them somewhere else.

Much like we now say somebody has been "one-shotted", might we now say they have been "clawed"?

I've been hoping one of them will be called Clod

I appreciate the sentiment, but think a homophone would be too confusing.

Confusion is only temporary until we're replaced by agentic giga nerd superintelligence /s

People are not understanding that “claw” derives from the original spin on “Claude” when the original tool was called “clawdbot”