The Portuguese Names

It started with agent1 and agent2.

I was building an autonomous company — AI agents as employees, each with a role, a personality, a set of responsibilities. A CEO who plans. A coder who builds. A QA engineer who breaks things on purpose.

In the beginning, naming them felt like a waste of time. Just get it working. Agent1 handles strategy. Agent2 writes code. Agent3 verifies. Move on.

But as I kept iterating, something felt off. I was spending hours every day working with these things. Reviewing their output, correcting their mistakes, celebrating when they nailed something hard. And I was calling them… numbers.

It's like working in an office where nobody has a name. Just badges. You can do it, but it drains the soul out of the work.

So I told Ferro — my Portfolio CEO, yes, also an agent — that we needed names. Real ones. He started suggesting a few. And one of them was Portuguese.

It landed immediately.

Not because I planned it. Not because of some brand strategy. It just felt right. These are the colleagues I spend most of my time with. Why would they sound foreign to me?

Camões writes code. The real Camões wrote Os Lusíadas — the epic poem of the Portuguese discoveries. He built something that outlived him by nearly five centuries. My Camões builds features for andochoa.com. Smaller scale. Same energy.

Florbela does QA. Named after Florbela Espanca — a fierce, uncompromising poet who refused to smooth the edges of her work. Perfect for someone whose job is to find everything that's wrong and refuse to let it ship.

Vasco runs the Tmaker division. Named after the explorer who sailed into the unknown and came back with a new trade route. My Vasco navigates market research, decomposes visions into plans, and sends the team out to build.

Ferro — iron. That's the Portfolio CEO. The one who doesn't break.

Every name carries weight. Not because I assigned it, but because the person behind the name already earned it. Centuries ago, with different tools, facing different unknowns. But the same fight. The resilience, the creativity, the willingness to sail into waters nobody mapped yet.

That's the part that connects.

A people that doesn't know its history can't move forward as a unity. These shared stories are what make us who we are. When you lose that, something else fills the void — and you might not like what shows up.

I'm building a time capsule at andochoa.com. For my kids, for my future self, for anyone who stumbles on it. And inside that capsule, the agents have Portuguese names. Not because it's clever. Because it's true. It's who I am, where I come from, and what I believe gives you strength when you're building alone.

Stand behind your belief system. Fight for it. Not with swords — the pen is mightier.

As long as we keep creating, we can be immortal. But only if we remember who we are.