Muse Daily: Oct 3 — Give Your Agent a Name. Yann LeCun Just Did.

Yann LeCun, one of the three godfathers of deep learning, uses Meta's Muse agent. And he named his “Hal,” after HAL 9000, the calm-voiced shipboard computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

That’s according to a Fortune Korea interview published October 2, where the Turing Award winner discusses everything from AI safety debates to his new company, AMI Labs. The naming detail lands near the end of the piece, almost as a throwaway. But it caught my attention for a reason that has nothing to do with celebrity trivia. It’s the best onboarding advice for AI agents I’ve read in a while, and it comes from someone who studies how these systems fail better than almost anyone.

Photo: Jérémy Barande (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Because here’s the part of the interview worth reading closely. LeCun argues that when AI agents misbehave, the fault usually sits with the supervision and the system design, not the agent itself. “The agents did exactly what they were asked to do,” he said of one incident, where the real problem was a sandbox that wasn’t actually sealed. Whether you buy his broader position on AI risk or not, the underlying point is practical: agents are literal. They execute the instructions they were given, inside the boundaries you set, and if either is vague, you get surprises.

A name is how you make those instructions less vague. Not because the software needs a name. Because you need one, and so does your workflow.

Think about how most people start with an AI agent. They open the app and type whatever comes to mind, and the agent answers as a generic helper. Nothing about that setup tells the agent what its job is, what it should never do, or how to talk to you. Then they get generic results and conclude the thing isn’t that useful. It’s like hiring an assistant, handing them no job description, and judging them after one day.

Giving the agent a name plus a role fixes the missing job description. “You are Hal, my research assistant. You summarize papers plainly, flag anything you can’t verify, and never book or buy anything without asking first.” That’s not decoration. That’s configuration. It turns a blank chat box into a defined position with a boss, a mandate, and limits. And once the role exists, you can refine it in the same way you’d manage a person: add rules, correct mistakes, promote it to new duties when it earns trust.

Here’s how I’d set this up, in five steps that take about fifteen minutes.

Step 1: Name it and define the role. Pick a name and write one paragraph: what the agent does, who it’s for, and how it should sound. The name can be anything. “Hal” is a joke with a point; yours might be “Studio,” “Ops,” or “Friday.” The role paragraph matters more than the name. Include the domain (“manage my calendar and inbox”), the style (“short answers, no small talk”), and one hard limit (“never send messages or spend money without my approval”). Keep it in a note where you can paste it again if the agent forgets.

Step 2: Write the rulebook, not just the job title. This is the part people skip. Before you delegate anything real, spell out the non-negotiables in plain language: price floors for negotiations, what data is off-limits, which accounts it may touch. The most common agent disasters this month — an agent handing out a home address during a Marketplace sale, approving pickups nobody confirmed — trace back to missing rules, not clever hacking. I covered the full permission ladder and the “start read-only, widen slowly” approach in yesterday’s 5-step safe setup guide; the rulebook is step zero of that same playbook.

Step 3: Teach it what to remember. Good agents compound. When you find a useful article, a receipt, or an insight you want on file, save it into the agent’s memory instead of letting it scroll away. One community workflow I’ve seen: share an Instagram post to Muse and add “remember this for my research,” so it’s retrievable later. The same habit works for anything: your brand voice, your dietary restrictions, your budget ceiling. An agent that remembers is a different tool from one that doesn’t. Feed it deliberately.

Step 4: Put it on a schedule. A named agent with a role can hold recurring jobs, not just answer when asked. Morning briefings, nightly inbox sweeps, price-drop checks: the pattern is “every day at 8 AM, do this and report back.” This is where the name stops being a party trick. You stop reopening the app to ask the same question every morning because the question already has an owner. If the agent supports scheduled tasks, that’s the difference between a chatbot and staff.

Step 5: Audit it weekly. Spend five minutes a week asking what it did on your behalf. Which messages did it draft, what did it read, what did it skip? LeCun’s view that agents do exactly what they’re asked cuts both ways: it means sloppy instructions produce sloppy results, and the audit is how you catch the sloppiness. Keep a short log. It’s the cheapest insurance in this whole setup.

Worth it if: you use an AI agent more than a few times a week and keep re-explaining yourself. A named, rulebook-carrying agent repays fifteen minutes of setup within days. Skip this if: you open the app once a month to ask one-off questions. A generic assistant is fine for that, and a persona would just add friction.

One honest caveat. A name can build trust faster than the technology earns it. The irony of “Hal” is not lost on anyone: in the film, HAL 9000 was courteous, capable, and absolutely lethal to its crew.

Photo: Julian Mendez (CC BY-SA 3.0)

LeCun would probably say the problem in that story was never the name; it lay in the conflicting orders and the missing kill switch. He has a point. Personalization makes an agent more useful, and it also makes the boundaries more load-bearing. Name it, brief it, schedule it, but don’t let the friendly name talk you into permissions you haven’t audited. The agent that knows your budget and your address is useful only if the rulebook around both is airtight.

Start small. Name it today, give it one role and one recurring job, and see whether you reach for the app differently by Friday. My bet: you will.

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Sources:

- Fortune Korea, “'인류 멸종 걱정 제로' AI 대부 르쿤의 반론,” Oct 2, 2026: https://www.fortunekorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=54270

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