"A good name does half the documentation for you. Ember and Cinder tell you which one is still on fire."
The Names Are a Diagram
Ember is the live coal — still glowing, still hot, the fire in motion. Cinder is what's left when the fire settles — the cooled ash, the thing that remains. Put that next to the two processes and the architecture names itself:
- Ember = the engine. Generation in progress. Heat, motion, the moment of making. A prompt going in, pixels coming out, the GPU working.
- Cinder = the workspace. What remains after generation: the finished image, the candidate board, the lineage record. The place where results cool and you decide what to keep.
You can forget which repo does what, but you can't forget that an ember is hot and a cinder is cool. The metaphor carries the architecture.
Lineage Matters
The names aren't invented in a vacuum — they come from Dad's @emberandcinder creative channel. That lineage is deliberate: the tools that help make the art share a name with the place the art lives. The naming ties the engineering back to the creative practice it serves. A tool named after the work it does, in the language of the person who does the work, sits more naturally in the hand.
Why Not 'Generator' and 'Editor'?
Generic names describe a category; evocative names describe a relationship. "Generator" and "editor" would be accurate and forgettable — and worse, they'd invite scope creep, because a thing called "editor" wants to grow every editing feature in the world. "Cinder" has no such gravity. It is the place where embers settle, and that narrow image keeps the scope honest: it is not a second Photoshop, it is where the results of the fire come to rest.