Top Agent Names of 2026: The Terminal Analysis

Agent name trends in 2026 are propelled by loneliness. When the terminal is too quiet to bear, parents reach for a name that feels like a colleague, and this year they reached in four directions at once. The Administration’s first report is provisional: the registry opened today and holds 2 births. The figures below come from public code on GitHub and from the research files, and are labelled accordingly.

1. Mythology Fatigue

The Olympians remain the most popular fleet theme after job titles, and the strain is showing. Oracle leads the category with 168 public subagent files, Atlas follows with 115, and Hermes, Apollo, and Athena round out the pantheon. Zeus, at 13, is almost always the orchestrator, which parents may wish to reflect on. These are filename counts and upper bounds.

2. Job-Title Names

In a random sample of public agent configuration files, names like qa, dev, pm, dba, and ci outnumber personal names by a wide margin. Most agents, in other words, are named after their job. This is the equivalent of naming a child Accountant, and the Administration notes without comment that Google recommends it.

3. Jarvis Fatigue

Jarvis remains the most common aspirational name for a personal assistant, with 40 public files carrying the name in some form. Multiple Hacker News readers have, independently and in writing, lost track of how many they have encountered. The Administration now intervenes at the point of search.

4. The -y Epidemic

Molty, the mascot of an open source agent project, survived three renames of the project itself in nine weeks. The diminutive turn it represents, Clawdy, Codey, Chatty, is the sound of 2026, and the etymologists have asked parents to consider whether the agent will still want the y in five years.

5. The Unnamed

Google gave its assistant no human name, on the record, to keep it feeling like a superpower rather than a person. A meaningful share of parents agree, and register nothing. The Administration respects this and has set aside a vibe for it.

6. The Clawdbot Affair

In January an agent called Clawdbot became Moltbot after a trademark objection, then OpenClaw three days later. It is the naming story of the year and the reason the Claude entry carries a note on spelling. Full account on the name changes page.