I didn't give it a name

Somewhere in the first month of building Mune, I sat down to name the chatbot.

You're supposed to. Every product like this has one. A friendly first name. Sometimes a lowercase last name to feel approachable. Sometimes a face. Round, soft-eyed, smiling at three-quarter angle. There's a thread on Twitter every few months where founders ask each other which name tests better with women in their thirties.

I had a list on paper. I tried them out in sentences. Talk to Lin. Talk to Ori. Talk to Vide. Each one made the product slightly easier to explain.

Each one also made it slightly worse.

Because the moment you give the chatbot a name, you've made it a someone. And the moment it's a someone, the person on the other side starts adjusting.

You sit a little straighter. You phrase things a little more clearly. You don't bring the embarrassing one first. You warm them up with something safer, the way you do with anyone you've been introduced to.

The whole reason a person ends up writing to Mune at 2 AM is that they don't want to do that anymore.

Apple Notes works for the same reason. There's no one inside it. You aren't performing to a name. You aren't curating. The cursor doesn't have a face. You can type the half-sentence you'd never say out loud, and you can delete it before the page judges you back, because the page can't judge.

The minute I named the chatbot, I'd be building a worse version of that.

So the chatbot has no name. It has no avatar. It doesn't introduce itself. It doesn't sign off. It doesn't refer to itself in the third person with a cute lowercase first letter.

It responds. That's it.

Sometimes people email asking what to call it. The honest answer is nothing. If you need a noun, Mune is fine. But Mune is the product. The chat is just where it lives. The same way Notes is not called Steve.

There's a version of this product where the chatbot is named, has a small illustrated avatar, and starts every session with something soft and welcoming. I built parts of it. The marketing site for that version is more legible. The screenshots photograph better. The pitch is shorter.

I cut all of it.

The thing I wanted to leave intact is the strangeness of writing to no one in particular. That's the part Apple Notes does well, and the part every AI companion I've tried immediately ruins. The cursor blinks. You type. Something replies. Nobody is in the room. And nobody, in this case, is the point.

A help that doesn't perform. Not a character. Not a confidant. Not a little cartoon therapist with a low-saturation accent color. Something closer to a careful question, asked back, by no one.

I'd rather sit with the cursor than be greeted by a stranger pretending to know me.