[literallyaduck]

A name generator makes the cattle herdable. Humans may remember zombie-wombat-kitten but not 3991. You might not ever interact with the machine directly but if you are hunting down an issue from log files it reduces cognitive load.

[fragmede]

The important thing is cognitive load is the key thing, as is the possibility of confusion. Zombie-Wombat-Kitten is going to get shortened to ZWK, and hopefully there's no Zombie-Wombat-Keeper (or Zebra-Wagon-Kelp or Zombie-Wombat-Cat for those that just remember zombie-something-small-furry-animal). There's also little/no semantic meaning from that name. api-box-3-991 lets you know what type it is, and the relative vintage, so at a glance, it's not a version 2 box (which would be named api-box-2-991), and it's fairly late in the series, #991 vs #100.

Personally I like the second since we're having cattle not pets, but it's your fleet and this is rather bike-shed-y. :)