Naming Scout

An agent skill for naming a startup, product, app, library or newsletter. It interviews you about what you are building before generating anything, and works inside metaphor territories rather than permuting your keywords.

Every candidate is then checked where it counts. Domains are read from the registry itself, alongside the package registries and hand checks your project actually needs. A check that failed is reported as failed, never as free.

Works in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode and 75 other agents.

Why it is different

A name generator gets one word from you. Naming Scout gets your whole situation.

What you type into a generator:

budget

What you tell Naming Scout:

A budgeting app for freelancers. They earn £9,000 one month and £900 the
next. It works out a safe amount to pay yourself, so bad months stop hurting.
Freelancers will recommend it to other freelancers. UK and US.

It asks a few questions before it starts. Everything below comes from that difference.

A generator only knows one word, so it can only add letters to it.

None of these says what your app does. And all of them are gone. Every generator looks in the same small place, so that place is empty.

Naming Scout knows what your app is for, so it can look for meaning.

Your app stops bad months from hurting. A cushion is soft. It stops you getting hurt when you fall. So it can reach names like these:

You get 8 to 15 names like this. Each one comes with a reason and a weakness. These two are examples, not a promise.

Then it tells you which one it would pick, and why. Cash Cushion is the better name, but you have to buy the domain. Even Months costs about $12 today.

Most generators never show you Cash Cushion at all. They only show names with a free domain, so the better name never reaches you.

It also knows which checks you need.

You are building a phone app, so it checks the app stores, the trademark registers and the social handles. It skips npm and PyPI, because nobody installs your app from a terminal. A Python library gets the opposite. A newsletter gets neither.

A domain search cannot do this, because it never learns what you are building.

Then it tells you the truth about every domain.

Most tools show you a red cross. You learn nothing from a red cross. You get five answers instead:

The last one matters most. Other tools show a failed check as a free domain. You find out later, after you have chosen the name.

It also does these

It can name your product in your own language. You are building a shop app in Dhaka. Ask for Bangla names.

The two names you would reach for first are already gone:

An app called TallyKhata already serves Bangladeshi shopkeepers, and tallykhata.com went in 2018. A generator would offer you that name and say nothing about it.

Naming Scout keeps going and finds names that are still free:

A shopkeeper in Dhaka understands these at once. An English name would need explaining.

It also checks every English spelling. Bangla is not written in English letters, so your customers spell it in different ways. If you buy amardokan.com and a customer types amardukan.com, they land on somebody else's website. All three spellings are taken, and they were registered years apart:

It does this for Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Turkish, Thai and Korean too.

It knows that changing the spelling will not save you. Your name is taken, so you think about dropping a letter or swapping one. Everybody tries this:

Someone always got there first, often twenty years earlier. A changed spelling also sends your customers to the wrong website, because they type the spelling they know.

Naming Scout checks the changed spelling before you choose it. Then it looks for a better answer. staticapi.dev is free.

Keep the spelling people know. Change the ending instead.

It tells you if people can find you. Every name gets one of three answers:

• ownable. Nothing else uses this name. You will be the first search result.
• contested. Other things share this name. You will need time and work.
• crowded. This name is a common word. You may never be first.

A name people cannot find costs you more than an expensive domain.

What you get

A web page opens in your browser. The answer is at the top.

You see one recommended name, why it works, and the domain to buy. You also see the one thing that would change the answer. Below that, two more names, then the full list.

Every name comes with a weakness. If a name has no weakness listed, nobody checked it properly.

What it checks

It checks these on its own:

• Domain names, at the registry
• GitHub usernames
• npm, PyPI, crates.io, RubyGems and Docker Hub package names

It helps you check these by hand, because they need judgement:

• Trademarks
• Search results
• App stores
• Social media handles

Install

npx skills add me-shaon/naming-scout

Add -g to install it for every project rather than just the current one. You need curl and jq. Optional: export GITHUB_TOKEN=… raises the GitHub check from 60 requests an hour to 5,000.

Real examples

Eight complete runs with real data: naming-scout/examples/

Full guide: naming-scout/README.md

What it cannot do

• It cannot tell you a domain price. No registry publishes prices. It tells you a listing exists and sends you there.
• It cannot check every domain ending. .co and most South Asian endings have no registry API. Those come back as "not checked".
• It cannot check social handles. The platforms give wrong answers, so it sends you to look.
• It cannot clear a trademark. It helps you search. That is not legal advice.

Before you spend money on a brand, ask a lawyer to do a trademark search in every country you will sell in. Changing your name later costs far more.