Release codenames

Every vibe-view minor release carries a “Person’s Animal” codename. It is printed by vibe-view --version, shown in the browser and desktop About boxes, and stamped on the CHANGELOG section for the release.

Why the form is shared and the pool is not

vibe-qc, vibe-view and vibe-queue came out of one monorepo and are meant to read as one family of products. Keeping the form — a scientist’s surname, possessive, then an animal, usually alliterating — is what makes a reader recognise a vibe-* release from the name alone.

Keeping the pools separate is what stops two products claiming the same person. Each draws from the field it belongs to:

Product	Pool
vibe-qc	Quantum chemistry and electronic-structure theory
vibe-view	Visualization, computer graphics and crystallographic imaging
vibe-queue	(its own; not this project’s to assign)

An animal is used once across the whole family, not once per product.

How a name resolves

The catalogue lives in vibeview.codenames and is the single source of truth — the CLI, both About boxes and this documentation site all read it. RELEASE_CODENAMES maps X.Y.Z to a name, and codename_for_version() resolves in this order:

1. Strip any PEP-440 .devN / aN / bN / rcN suffix and local version label, so a dev build inherits the codename of the release it leads up to.

2. Look up the resulting X.Y.Z.

3. Fall back to the parent minor, X.Y.0 — so patch releases inherit without needing an entry of their own.

4. Return None if the minor has no name; the surfaces then print the bare version rather than a dangling em dash.

A patch release only needs its own entry when it has a distinct theme worth surfacing separately.

The catalogue

Version	Codename	For
2.15.0	Roothaan’s Roadrunner	The name v2.15.2 shipped with
2.16.0	Sayle’s Starling	vibe-view becomes a product you can adopt on its own
2.17.0	Lorensen’s Loon	TREXIO molecular orbitals in the isosurface workflow
2.18.0	Richardson’s Robin	Biomolecules, secondary structure, cartoons — approved, not yet released
2.19.0	Phong’s Pheasant	Materials and lighting — approved, not yet released
2.20.0	Levoy’s Lemur	Transfer functions and direct volume rendering — approved, not yet released
3.0.0	Levinthal’s Lynx	Held for a major version about the interactive viewer itself — approved, not yet released

Note

Roothaan’s Roadrunner predates the split and the per-product pools, and it borrows a quantum-chemistry figure that vibe-qc had already used (Roothaan’s Raven, v0.1.0). It is in the wild — in the CLI, in the desktop About box and in a tagged wheel — so it stands as history, by maintainer decision on 2026-09-09. Names from v2.16.0 on come from the pool below.

Six names are registered ahead of their cuts, all approved by the maintainer on 2026-09-09 — v2.16.0 so its artwork brief could be written against it, and v2.17.0 through v3.0.0 as a settled slate.

Registered is not scheduled. A version resolves to its name whenever it is cut, and an entry here commits to nothing about when, or whether, that release happens. What each name is for is recorded in the catalogue above and in the comment on its entry in RELEASE_CODENAMES. Roger Sayle’s RasMol (1992) was the first molecular viewer a scientist could simply install and run — free, and without the program that produced the data. That is the release: vibe-view becoming a product you can adopt on its own. Starlings are ordinary and gregarious, and their murmurations are the standard image of structure emerging from many small parts.

v2.15.0 — Roothaan’s Roadrunner

v2.15.0 “Roothaan’s Roadrunner” — the monorepo splits into four repositories.

v2.16.0 — Sayle’s Starling

v2.16.0 “Sayle’s Starling” — a product you can adopt on its own.

v2.17.0 — Lorensen’s Loon

v2.17.0 “Lorensen’s Loon”.

v2.18.0 — Richardson’s Robin

v2.18.0 “Richardson’s Robin”.

v2.19.0 — Phong’s Pheasant

v2.19.0 “Phong’s Pheasant”.

v2.20.0 — Levoy’s Lemur

v2.20.0 “Levoy’s Lemur”.

v3.0.0 — Levinthal’s Lynx

v3.0.0 “Levinthal’s Lynx”.

Proposed pool

Warning

A pool, not a schedule. Codenames are a maintainer decision. Six names have been picked out of this pool already; their rows below are marked taken with the version that holds them, and the catalogue at the top of this page is the authority. Every unmarked row is unclaimed, and no release should be tagged against one until the maintainer picks it.

Mark the row in the same commit that registers the name. A prose note saying an animal is spent does not help the next picker, because what they read is the table: they choose it, write the rationale, and only then does test_the_catalogue_never_reuses_an_animal tell them it collides.

The field vibe-view belongs to is the one that turned computed numbers into something you can look at. Three strands, all of them ancestors of this program:

Molecular graphics — the people who first made a molecule something you could rotate on a screen.

Person	Contribution	Proposed animal
Cyrus Levinthal	The first interactive molecular graphics system (MIT, 1965)	Lynx — taken, v3.0.0
Robert Langridge	Interactive molecular graphics for biology, 1960s–70s	Lark
Jane Richardson	The ribbon diagram (1981) — the cartoon this viewer draws	Robin — taken, v2.18.0
Michael Connolly	The solvent-excluded molecular surface (1983)	Condor
Roger Sayle	RasMol (1992) — the first molecular viewer anyone could just install	Starling — taken, v2.16.0
Nelson Max	Early molecular surface rendering	Marten

Computer graphics — the algorithms the renderer is literally built out of.

Person	Contribution	Proposed animal
William Lorensen	Marching cubes (1987); a founder of VTK, which this viewer renders with	Loon — taken, v2.17.0
Will Schroeder	VTK co-creator, The Visualization Toolkit	Stork
Bui Tuong Phong	The Phong reflection model — the shading a molecular scene uses	Pheasant — taken, v2.19.0
Jim Blinn	Blinn–Phong; blobby models, i.e. isosurfaces of summed densities	Bittern
Marc Levoy	Direct volume rendering (1988)	Lemur — taken, v2.20.0
Turner Whitted	Recursive ray tracing (1980)	Wren
James Kajiya	The rendering equation (1986)	Kite
Edwin Catmull	Z-buffer, texture mapping, subdivision surfaces	Curlew
Ivan Sutherland	Sketchpad (1963)	Swift
Ken Perlin	Perlin noise	Petrel
Arthur Appel	The first ray casting (1968)	Auk

Crystallographic imaging — seeing structure that no microscope could resolve.

Person	Contribution	Proposed animal
Kathleen Lonsdale	X-ray crystallography; proved benzene planar (1929)	Linnet
Dorothy Hodgkin	Structures of penicillin, B12, insulin; Nobel 1964	Heron
Rosalind Franklin	Photo 51	Falcon
Max von Laue	X-ray diffraction by crystals; Nobel 1914	Lapwing (Lark is Langridge’s)
A. Lindo Patterson	The Patterson function	Pelican
Herbert Hauptman	Direct methods; Nobel 1985	Hare

Data visualization, if a release is ever about the charts rather than the 3-D scene: Jacques Bertin (Bittern), Edward Tufte (Toucan), John Tukey (Tapir).

Names already spent by vibe-qc, and therefore unavailable: Raven, Eagle, Wolf, Magpie, Hedgehog, Otter, Owl, Kingfisher, Goose, Cheetah, Puffin, Tern, Badger, Raccoon, Sloth, Axolotl, Llama.

Names taken out of the pool

Every name below is registered in RELEASE_CODENAMES and appears in the catalogue at the top of this page. They are kept here with their reasoning because the why is the point: each is tied to what that release would actually be about, the way the vibe-qc series does it, and that is what keeps the names from being decoration.

v2.16.0 — Sayle’s Starling — see above.

v2.17.0 — Lorensen’s Loon

For a release centred on isosurfaces and volume rendering. William Lorensen gave us marching cubes (1987) — the algorithm behind every density and orbital surface this viewer draws — and co-founded VTK, which it renders with. The most directly earned name in the pool. A loon dives and surfaces.

v2.18.0 — Richardson’s Robin

For biomolecular work — chains, residues, secondary structure, cartoons. Jane Richardson invented the ribbon diagram in 1981, and it is still what the viewer draws when a structure section carries secondary structure.

v2.19.0 — Phong’s Pheasant

For materials and lighting, anchoring a release in the renderer rather than in the product. Bui Tuong Phong’s reflection model is how a molecular scene is lit.

v2.20.0 — Levoy’s Lemur

For transfer functions. Marc Levoy’s direct volume rendering (1988) takes colour and opacity straight from the data without extracting a surface — the other half of the volume story from Lorensen’s.

v3.0.0 — Levinthal’s Lynx

For a major version, if one is about the interactive viewer itself. Cyrus Levinthal built the first interactive molecular graphics system in 1965, on hardware that had no business doing it. A lynx is what you name the thing that sees in the dark.

Two consequences for the pool above:

• Lynx is spent, so Kathleen Lonsdale’s entry above now reads Linnet alone. It offered Lynx / Linnet until v3.0.0 took Lynx; leaving the alternative in the table would have handed the next picker a collision the test only catches after they have written the rationale. Every other registered name is now marked taken in the pool tables for the same reason.

• Lark was offered twice — to Robert Langridge and to Max von Laue — which the one-animal-per-family rule forbids and no test can see, since neither is registered. Von Laue’s row now proposes Lapwing.

• Blinn’s Bittern (blobby models — isosurfaces of summed atomic densities, which is exactly what a density surface is) remains the strongest unclaimed candidate for a renderer-anchored release.

Adding a name at release time

In the same commit that bumps the version:

1. Add the X.Y.0 entry to RELEASE_CODENAMES in src/vibeview/codenames.py, with a comment saying who the person is and why the release earned the name.

2. Update the trailing comment on __version__ in src/vibeview/__init__.py.

3. Promote ## [Unreleased] in CHANGELOG.md to ## [X.Y.Z] - YYYY-MM-DD - *Person's Animal*.

4. Add the row to the catalogue table on this page.

tests/test_release_codenames.py checks that every surface agrees with the catalogue — the CLI, the browser About box, the Electron fallback string and the version comment. Before the catalogue existed the name was pasted into each by hand, and nothing could see them drift.

Artwork

Each release gets a 1672 × 941 image in one of the two house treatments the vibe-qc series established. The brief for the next one is written before the release and lives with private release coordination outside this checkout. The images above are AI-generated artwork, separate from the real software captures used in the manual.