Bye Bye Robots

The title is misleading. On purpose. 😇

Obviously we are not saying bye to robots, bots or any other cute creatures. We are merely cleaning up the language that has caused confusion among our users for quite some time.

Let’s look at the starting point. Robot on Robocorp platform has been a word to describe “the code”. Either a package uploaded to Control Room, or something that is managed in a git repo and then connected to the Control Room. Each Robot had 1..n Tasks, which are the things you build Processes from. Ok clear?

Not really.

The problem is that the word Robot comes with a lot of loaded expectations for people used to some of the other platforms. On some platforms Robot means (loosely) a licence. So the confusion has been granted.

Now we are fixing this. The solution: Just drop the word Robot. 💁‍♂️

It actually is as simple as that. We already have a word Task for something a developer creates, we are elevating that word everywhere across platform. One Task, many Tasks, and when wrapped to a Task Package with developer tools, they can be added to and used in the Control Room to compose Processes and Assistants. The image below shows the direction we are taking with the Task Packages view in the Control Room. Details might still change a bit during implementation.

Changing the the terminology everywhere will take some time, but we are starting this week. Further updates in various parts of the product will follow along with the other releases. Make sure to follow the release notes.

When it comes to Processes (unattended) and Assistants (attended), nothing changes. But as a reminder, one of the strengths of the platform is how the code (Tasks) and something runnable (Processes) are decoupled, enabling easy re-use of components.

Processes are made up from Steps. Very simply put, a Step is a combination of a chosen Task, the Worker that provides the runtime and the environment variables that may be used to configure the execution.

But for now, join us in saying bye bye to Robots. 👋