ADR-004: Greek God Agent Naming
Status: Accepted
Date: 2026-05-09
Context
Embercore has five specialized AI agents, each with a distinct role in the marketing workflow. We needed a naming convention that is:
- Memorable — Easy to reference in CLI commands, logs, and documentation
- Distinctive — Each name clearly maps to one role with no ambiguity
- Consistent — A unified theme rather than ad-hoc names
- Evocative — Names should hint at the agent’s function
Alternatives considered:
- Functional names (
PlannerAgent,WriterAgent) — precise but generic and forgettable - Animal names — no natural mapping to marketing/strategy roles
- Color/element names — arbitrary, no semantic connection
Decision
We use Greek god names, chosen so each deity’s mythological domain maps to the agent’s role:
| Agent | God | Mythological Domain | Embercore Role | Package |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Athena | Goddess of wisdom & strategy | Strategic planning | Plan generation, validation, dependency analysis | agents/athena/ |
| Hermes | Messenger of the gods | Communication & execution | Plan execution, orchestration, checkpoint management | agents/hermes/ |
| Apollo | God of arts & music | Creative expression | Copywriting, content generation (blog, email, social, ads) | agents/apollo/ |
| Hephaestus | God of the forge | Craftsmanship & building | Document assembly, artifact building, template rendering | agents/hephaestus/ |
| Hestia | Goddess of the hearth & home | Domestic stability | Memory, storage, persistence (SQLite wrapper) | agents/hestia/ |
Usage in code
Agents are referenced by name in plan specs and CLI output:
# In a plan YAML
steps:
- name: research
agent: Athena
- name: write-copy
agent: Apollo
depends_on: [research]
- name: assemble
agent: Hephaestus
depends_on: [write-copy]
Athena validates agent names against a known list: Athena, Apollo, Hephaestus, Hestia, Hermes (see agents/athena/athena.go).
Consequences
Benefits:
- Highly memorable — contributors and users quickly learn the five names
- Natural conversational reference (“Athena generates the plan, Hermes executes it”)
- Each name carries an intuitive hint about the agent’s function
- The theme is extensible — Greek mythology has many more deities for future agents (e.g., Artemis for analytics, Demeter for nurturing/growth campaigns)
Trade-offs:
- New contributors must learn the name-to-role mapping (mitigated by the Glossary)
- Cultural assumption — Greek mythology is Western-centric
- Some mappings are looser than others (Hestia as “storage” stretches the hearth metaphor)
Related decisions: