Naming record

Working notes on the project name: what has been proposed, what is actually available, and what is still owed before any name is treated as final.

Three things here are now claimed. A GitHub organization named for the project, kaimahi-agents, exists and hosts the repo (2026-09-01). The public repository kaimahi-agents/homebrew-tap and its Homebrew formula kmx were explicitly approved and created on 2026-09-29; the short tap name is kaimahi-agents/tap. The user owns kaimahi.dev, registered on 2026-10-10; it is the domain for KMX labels and API groups, including kmx.kaimahi.dev/installed. No other package or domain has been registered. An organization, package or domain name is a public claim — a stronger one than a repo rename. When the organization was created, both gates set on the name (a cultural read and trademark counsel) were still open, which made them more urgent for it, not less. The cultural read has since cleared; trademark counsel has not been taken, as recorded below. Claiming anything further is an outward-facing action that needs the user's explicit approval naming the exact artifact.

The candidates

All three proposals landed on the same metaphor without coordinating: a household spirit that does the work while you sleep. That is the right image for a delegated agent, and it is worth noting the naming instinct was consistent even when the words were not available.

Name	Origin	Status
kaimahi	te reo Māori — worker	settled — cultural read cleared; no trademark opinion taken
hob	English folklore — hobgoblin/household spirit that does the chores at night	blocked — taken on npm, PyPI, the GitHub handle, and hob.dev
tomte	Scandinavian folklore — farm spirit that works at night for a bowl of porridge	previous name; retired. PyPI tomte is taken

Verified live against each registry's API on 2026-09-01. This decays — re-verify before acting on any of it.

hob — the short name, and why it is gone

hob was recommended and is the strongest of the three on ergonomics. Three letters. An easy binary name you would not mind typing fifty times a day. Same folklore lineage as tomte: feed it, do not insult it, or it stops helping.

It is taken, on exactly the namespaces that matter:

Namespace	hob	Detail
npm	TAKEN	published at 0.0.1
PyPI	TAKEN	hob 0.3.3 — "A multi-language code generator for the Opera Scope Protocol"
GitHub handle	TAKEN
hob.dev	TAKEN	registered 2026-03-12
crates.io	free
hob.io, hob.sh	free
npm hob-cli, create-hob	free

Short names are the first to go; three letters simultaneously free on npm, PyPI, GitHub, and .dev was never likely. The fallbacks that remain (hob-cli, create-hob, hob.io) give up precisely the property that made the name attractive — that it was short and unqualified. A CLI-first tool whose whole pitch is npx <name> create agent cannot afford a qualified package name as its front door.

So hob was not pursued because the namespace was gone, not because the metaphor was wrong.

kaimahi — the current name

kaimahi — te reo Māori for worker. Chosen as the replacement for tomte, and held provisional behind two gates: a cultural read by a te reo Māori speaker, and trademark counsel. It was settled with the first cleared and the second never taken, which is recorded in full below.

FYI, in plain terms:

• It is a real word in a living language, not a coined token. That is the appeal and the risk: it reads naturally to New Zealand speakers and carries meaning that a made-up name would not.
• The name is settled — meaning chosen as the project's name, which is not the same as cleared for use — and here is exactly on what basis. Of those two gates:
  1. The cultural read CLEARED. A te reo Māori speaker was comfortable with the use. Te reo Māori is a taonga protected under the Treaty of Waitangi and commercial use of Māori words by non-Māori projects is a live issue, not a formality — which is why this gate came first and why it is recorded rather than assumed.
  2. Trademark counsel was NOT obtained. No opinion was taken, and none is claimed. This is written plainly so that silence is never later mistaken for clearance.
• What that permits, and what it does not. Publishing is unblocked and free namespaces may be claimed. Nothing here asserts a trademark — no ™, no "registered", no claim of exclusivity — and the project stays renameable in principle. The residual risk is stated and accepted: a later conflict would cost a rename, and every namespace claimed makes that rename dearer.
• kmx, the binary, is settled on the same basis, accepting that PyPI kmx and the GitHub user kmx are already taken and are not ours, and that KMX is CarMax's ticker symbol.
• The repo was renamed ahead of the freeze. The user renamed it to kaiwahi — a typo, w/m transposed — which was caught and corrected to gambtho/kaimahi. It has since moved into a GitHub organization named for the project: kaimahi-agents/kaimahi. GitHub redirects from the old paths (gambtho/tomte, gambtho/kaimahi) are active.
• The in-repo rename has landed (commit 01f5c3c): README, runbooks, Makefile, scripts, k8s/, and CI. The kind cluster is now kaimahi-p1 (was tomte-p1) and the Copilot token cache moved to ~/.config/kaimahi/ — both are one-time local migrations for anyone with an existing checkout; see getting-started.md and models.md.
• Renaming the tree was never the same as clearing the name. The rename was a mechanical substitution and kept the no-trademark wording; clearance came later and only in part, as recorded above.
• Pronunciation, for the inevitable meeting: roughly kigh-MAH-hee (kai as in "kite", not "kay").
• Icon, added after the name was settled: the repository mark is a stylized ketu, which Te Aka Māori Dictionary defines as a pointed, paddle-shaped cultivation implement used to loosen soil. It is a working-tool metaphor, not a waka paddle, traditional pattern, or claim of cultural authority. The cultural read above covered the name, not this later icon; see the brand note.

Availability, verified 2026-09-01

Historical snapshot, checked live against each registry's API, not inferred. The table is retained as the 2026-09-01 record; kaimahi.dev was subsequently registered on 2026-10-10 as noted above. This decays — re-verify unclaimed namespaces before acting on it.

Registry / namespace	kaimahi	Notes
npm kaimahi	free (404)
npm create-kaimahi	free (404)	the npm create / npx convention
npm kaimahi-cli	free (404)	fallback if the bare name is ever contested
PyPI kaimahi	free (404)
crates.io kaimahi	free (404)
GitHub org/user kaimahi	free (404)	the bare name; the org actually created is kaimahi-agents
kaimahi.dev	free (RDAP 404)
kaimahi.io	free (RDAP 404)
kaimahi.ai	free (RDAP 404)
kaimahi.sh	free (RDAP 404)
kaimahi.com	TAKEN	registered 2009-04-12, expires 2027-04-12, Tucows; transfer/update locked

kaimahi.com being held since 2009 by an unrelated party is the one material finding beyond the first availability check, which only looked at .dev and .io. It does not block the project name — .dev is the conventional choice here and was free at that check (now owned by the user) — but it does mean the .com is not a fallback, and a trademark search should account for whoever holds it.

Previous name: tomte

tomte — Scandinavian folklore: a small household spirit that does the work of the farm at night, in exchange for a bowl of porridge. Apt for the product; the name was in use through the restart, and through the first agent on kind and the model path that followed it.

Registry / namespace	tomte	Notes
npm tomte	free (404)	never claimed
crates.io tomte	free (404)
PyPI tomte	TAKEN	tomte 0.7.2 — a published tooling library, unrelated project

The PyPI collision is a concrete example of why "the name looked free" is not a durable position: the same word was already shipping on one of the three registries a polyglot project would eventually want.

Repo history: the original gambtho/tomte was renamed to gambtho/tomte-old and archived; the redux was a fresh repo, later renamed to gambtho/kaimahi, then moved into the kaimahi-agents organization as kaimahi-agents/kaimahi.

Rejected / not pursued

Name	Why not
kaiwahi	not a considered candidate — a transposition typo of kaimahi, caught during the repo rename

Before claiming anything

1. Clear the two gates — DONE in part: cultural read cleared; trademark counsel not taken and not claimed.
2. Re-verify availability the same day (this table decays).
3. Get explicit user approval naming the exact artifact — "register kaimahi.dev", "publish npm create-kaimahi" — not blanket approval of the name.
4. Claim the whole set at once if claiming at all; a half-claimed name is worse than an unclaimed one.