Methodology

Candidate collection

Your seed word becomes the first candidate.
Wordnik contributes synonyms and related words for the seed.
Injected candidates — callers (including future agent clients) may supply their own synonym/creative alternatives, which receive their own provenance and never consume AI quota.
Creative generation (optional, signed-in users) asks a language model for structured suggestions.

All candidates are normalized (trimmed, lowercased, whitespace-collapsed) and deduplicated. When several sources produce the same name, the result keeps a set of provenance labels.

Where checks run

Server venue (npm, PyPI, RubyGems, Hex, Maven Central, Go): your browser asks this site’s /api/check endpoint, which performs a single upstream lookup per request and caches the verdict briefly. Requests are rate limited per client IP and per registry to stay polite with upstreams.
Browser venue (crates.io, NuGet, Packagist): your browser fetches the registry’s public, CORS-enabled API directly — no server round-trip — so requests come from your own connection. Verdicts are cached in your browser’s local storage and revalidated in the background when stale.

Go has no official JSON search API, so its bare-word results come from the pkg.go.dev search page and are flagged as fuzzy leads to verify — never definitive. If pkg.go.dev blocks or rate-limits the request, the result is an honest unknown, never available. A full module path (e.g. github.com/x/y) is checked exactly against the Go module proxy instead.

Availability classification

Every registry maps upstream responses to one of four verdicts:

Result	Meaning
`taken`	The registry returned metadata proving the name exists (for Maven and Packagist, under any group or vendor).
`available`	The registry returned its documented not-found response for a valid name, or a search-style result set conclusively contained no exact match.
`invalid`	The name fails the registry’s own naming rules; we never queried the registry for it.
`unknown`	Timeout, rate limit, or any response that doesn’t prove presence or absence. We never guess.

Registry-specific normalization applies before checking (for example PyPI collapses foo_bar and foo-bar to the same project per PEP 503). Every availability answer includes the time it was checked and the exact name that was checked. “Available” is an observation, not a reservation — each registry remains the authority on publishing.

What we deliberately don’t do

No scope lookups. npm provides no dependable supported signal for scope claimability; scraping or inference would produce lies, so the feature doesn’t exist here.
No packages-inside-scope search for the same reason.
No guaranteed fresh answers. Results may be cached briefly by source policy; available-name results get the shortest freshness window because they can become taken at any time.