What is combobulating?

The word

To combobulate is to put something in order: to compose yourself, to organise, to arrange the pieces until they fit. Combobulating is that work in progress, the moment when a mess is being sorted out.

The word was made backwards. First came discombobulate, "to confuse, to throw into disorder", a joke word of 19th-century American English, built in the fashion of the time for long nonsense words that sound like Latin. It has no Latin root. Later, people took the "dis" off and got combobulate, its opposite, the way "gruntled" was pulled out of "disgruntled". Linguists call this a back-formation. Wiktionary lists the word and marks it humorous; most dictionaries, Merriam-Webster among them, list only "discombobulate".

The best-known use of the family is at the airport in Milwaukee. Since 2008, just past security, it has had a Recombobulation Area: benches where travellers put their shoes and belts back on and pull themselves together. The American Dialect Society voted "recombobulation area" the most creative word of 2008.

The word in Claude Code

If you use Claude Code, Anthropic's AI agent for programming in the terminal, you have probably met the word there. While Claude works on a task, a spinner turns beside a verb that changes as it goes: "Combobulating…", "Noodling…", "Flibbertigibbeting…", "Baking…", "Clauding…" and dozens more. It is a joke, and a fitting one: an agent at work takes a pile of files, errors and instructions and puts it in order.

The list is a setting. The spinnerVerbs key in ~/.claude/settings.json adds your own verbs to the built-in ones, or, with "mode": "replace", shows only yours (Claude Code's settings reference):

{
  "spinnerVerbs": {
    "mode": "append",
    "verbs": ["Recombobulating"]
  }
}

The company

Combobulating is also us: a company that moves a business's routine work onto AI agents and keeps them working. Supplier mail sorted, replies drafted, invoices checked against their orders. We took the name from the word, because that is the task: a company's work arrives as a heap of mail, spreadsheets and habits, and an agent puts it in order and keeps it there.

We are two founders, from fintech and healthtech, and we run our own work on agents too. You can see who you would talk to, book a free call, or rent a server with Claude Code ready to run and build your own agent.

Independent of Anthropic

Combobulating is an independent company. We are not affiliated with Anthropic, and Anthropic does not sponsor, endorse or support us, except where we say so explicitly. Claude and Claude Code are Anthropic's products and trademarks, and our customers use them on their own Anthropic accounts.