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0004 — Name the project Dogana

  • Status: Accepted
  • Date: 2026-07-28
  • Deciders: Akaion AI Lab

Context

"Akaion Runner" describes an org chart, not a product. It says the thing belongs to a vendor and runs something, which is exactly the impression an open-source project promising sovereignty must avoid: the pitch is "don't trust us, verify it yourself", and a name that leads with the vendor undercuts it before anyone reads a line of code.

The name also had to survive being said out loud in a room of engineers who did not build it.

Decision

Dogana — Italian for customs. Pronounced doh-GAH-nah.

A customs post is the product, literally: everything crossing the border is declared, checked against the rules, and either cleared or held, and a stamped record survives the crossing. That is the perimeter, the policy gate, and the trace, in one word that a non-technical buyer already understands.

It brings a vocabulary, which is the real reason

A good name gives the rest of the system its words. This one does:

Term What it names
declaration what a step states it is about to send outward
clearance the gate's decision on a tool call or an egress
manifest the trace — an ordered, verifiable record of every crossing
held a call the policy refused
green lane a path pre-cleared as low-sensitivity, no inspection needed

"The manifest shows three crossings, two cleared, one held" is a sentence a lawyer and a kernel engineer both parse correctly. That is worth more than a clever logo.

Italian is deliberate: it is coherent with an Italian lab building on an Italian framework (ADR 0001), and it is pronounceable everywhere.

Scope of the rename

Applied now:

  • runner/branding.py — a single source of truth for the name, tagline and vocabulary. Renaming again is one edit.
  • dogana installed as an equal console-script alias; akaion still works.
  • CLI help, documentation site, README.

Deliberately not applied:

  • The Python package stays runner. Renaming it churns every import and every test for no user-visible gain.
  • The repository stays akaion-app-runner until the project is public; renaming it breaks clone URLs and the release workflow's asset names.
  • The akaion command is not removed. Deleting a command people have in their shell history to make a naming change tidy is a bad trade.

Alternatives considered

Airlock. The obvious metaphor, and taken three times over in exactly this space — agent-airlock, airlock-dev/airlock and the project formerly called MCP-Airlock are all 2026 AI-agent security tools. Being the fourth Airlock is worse than being nobody.

Bastion, Boundary, Sentry, Checkpoint. All taken by established infrastructure or security products. Legally awkward at best, invisible in search at worst.

Perimeter. Accurate, dull, unsearchable.

Limes — the fortified Roman frontier, watchtowers and records included. Historically perfect and phonetically unfortunate: English speakers read the plural of a citrus fruit.

Membrane. Precise about selective permeability, too soft for something whose job is to refuse.

Consequences

Good. A name that carries the concept, a vocabulary that makes the docs easier to write, and no collision in the space it competes in. The project reads as a project rather than as a vendor's component, which is the point of open core.

Bad, and accepted. Two names in circulation during the transition — the command is akaion, the project is Dogana — which is mildly confusing until the repository goes public and the primary command follows. The alias keeps that from being a breaking change whenever it happens.

Neutral. "Dogana" is unfamiliar to non-Italian speakers on first hearing. Every strong project name was; the tagline does the explaining.