Naming Things Is Still the Hardest Part, Even With AI Suggesting Names

Every AI coding tool I've used will instantly suggest a plausible name for a variable, a function, an event. The suggestions are almost always syntactically fine and almost always slightly wrong in a way that takes longer to notice than it should.

A recent example: an AI assistant suggested trackCheckoutComplete for an event that fired when a user reached the order confirmation page, regardless of whether payment had actually succeeded. The name was fluent, confident, and conceptually wrong — it implied a completed transaction when the actual event represented 'reached a page,' a meaningfully different thing for anyone downstream trying to calculate conversion rate off it.

The part that's always been hard

Naming was never difficult because of vocabulary. It's difficult because it forces you to actually decide what a thing conceptually is before you can label it accurately, and that decision requires context an autocomplete tool doesn't have — what the event is actually used for downstream, what decision it feeds, what it would mean if someone six months from now trusted the name literally.

A name suggestion engine can generate words fast. It can't tell you what the thing actually is, and that was always the hard part.

What's actually changed

• Naming suggestions now arrive instantly, which removes the small friction that used to force a pause and a moment of thought before committing to a name
• The failure mode shifted from 'vague name, obviously needs more thought' to 'confident name, looks finished, quietly wrong' — harder to catch in review
• I now explicitly review AI-suggested names against what the thing is actually used for downstream, a step I used to do naturally while typing the name myself slowly
• Teams that have the most naming trouble now are the ones that let the speed of suggestion substitute for the pause that naming used to force

If anything, AI assistance made naming marginally more dangerous, not easier — it removed the friction that used to accidentally force the conceptual decision before you could move on. The thinking still has to happen. It just doesn't get forced on you by a blank autocomplete anymore.