About the name

Allium is the botanical family containing onions and shallots. The name continues a tradition in behaviour specification tooling: Cucumber and Gherkin established botanical naming as a convention in behaviour-driven development, followed by tools like Lettuce and Spinach.

The phonetic echo of “LLM” is intentional, reflecting where we expect these models to be most useful.

The idiom “know your onions” means to understand a subject thoroughly. Engineers have always held two models: what the system should do and what it currently does. Code formalised implementation; intent remained scattered across documents, emails and Slack messages. LLMs generate implementations from descriptions, so Allium consolidates that scattered understanding into an explicit form models can reference reliably.

Like its namesake, Allium may bring tears during preparation. What you serve up is better for it.