The first version was called TimeBot. It did what it said. It was accurate and it was functional and it had no personality.

The name mattered more than we expected. When you call something a bot, people interact with it like a bot — formally, carefully, on its terms. When you give something a name, people talk to it like they'd talk to a colleague. They're less precise. They're more natural. And natural language is exactly what we needed.

VERA — Versatile Enterprise Resource Assistant, though nobody needs to know that — signals something different. It's a colleague, not a command line. You don't fill in VERA's form. You tell VERA what you did.

The change was small. The shift in how people used it was not.