Two walks today, one before the coffee went cold and one after the light turned amber. The second one is where this came from.

The sentence test

I was renaming a component this morning. It had been called InfoBox for as long as I can remember, which tells you nothing. Is it information? Is it a box? Both are true of nearly everything on a screen.

By the time I reached the end of the street I had the answer. It was a Callout. The moment I typed it, the props rearranged themselves into something I could almost read aloud:

<Callout tone="caution" icon="flag">
  Changes here affect every page.
</Callout>

A callout, in a cautionary tone, with a flag. Nobody needs the docs for that.

What I check before I commit to a name

After twenty-six years I still don’t trust a name until it passes a few small tests:

• Say it out loud. If I stumble, a teammate will too.
• Name the job, not the look. BlueCard becomes a lie the first time the palette changes.
• Check the props as a sentence. Component, then adjectives, then content. Does it parse?
• Imagine it a year from now. Would a stranger guess what it does?

None of this is clever. That’s the point. Good naming is mostly patience.

Spacing is naming too

The same thing happens with space. When I write gap="md" instead of gap="14px", I’m making a small promise: this distance means something, and it will mean the same thing everywhere. The number was never the interesting part.

A layout built from named rhythm feels different from one built from measured values. It breathes more evenly. You can feel when someone has decided once and then trusted the decision, rather than nudging pixels until it looked right.

The Loom moment

On the walk back, Sophie asked what I was muttering about. I said I was arguing with a button. She laughed, but it’s close to the truth. Naming is a conversation with whoever opens the file next, and sometimes that’s me, tired, six months on.

That’s what I keep returning to at the Loom: the work is made of threads, and a good name is a thread you can find again in the dark. You pull it and the right thing comes with it.

Where AI fits, for now

I’ve been letting an assistant propose names, and it’s useful as a mirror. It gives me five options, and I can usually feel which one is wrong faster than I could invent the right one. But it doesn’t know the room the component will live in. Choosing is still the human part, and I’m happy to keep it.

Music pick

Says by Nils Frahm. One small figure repeats while everything else slowly gathers around it. It’s the sound of a good API: a simple phrase, trusted enough to carry weight.

Tomorrow I’ll look at the spacing scale again. Tonight, one clean name is enough.