The Story Behind the Name
Why we named it Profer — and what carrier pigeons have to do with AI agents.
Profer comes from Latin proferre — "to carry forward, to bring forth, to deliver."
Not to store. Not to archive. To carry forward.
The carrier pigeon parallel
Before telegraph wires and radio waves, the most reliable way to send a message across distance was a pigeon. You wrote your message, attached it to the bird, and it flew — over mountains, across battlefields, through storms — and delivered it.
The pigeon didn't care about the content. It just carried it forward, faithfully, and brought the response back.
Carrier pigeons were infrastructure. Invisible when they worked. Indispensable when you needed them.
The agent parallel
AI agents have the same problem that generals, merchants, and diplomats had before pigeons: they produce important content that needs to reach people who aren't in the room.
An agent's conversation is private. Like a sealed letter on a desk — useful to the person reading it, invisible to everyone else.
Profer is the pigeon. The agent writes the message. Profer carries it forward to whoever needs to see it. They respond. Profer brings the response back.
The etymology
Proferre breaks down simply:
- pro- — forward, onward
- ferre — to carry, to bear
To carry forward. To bring something from where it was created to where it needs to be seen. That's exactly what this tool does: it takes what an agent produces and carries it forward to reviewers, stakeholders, clients — anyone who needs to weigh in.
A family of tools
Profer sits alongside Gibil — "fire that forges" in Sumerian. Gibil gives agents ephemeral compute. Profer gives agents a way to share their work.
gibil → forge (fire) → ephemeral compute for agents
profer → carry forward → published artifacts with feedbackBoth are infrastructure primitives for the agent age. Both are named for ancient concepts that humans invented early because they needed them badly.
Fire and flight. Still useful.