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I explicitly don't want to use a manually-assigned name, auto-naming is correct for us here! But I do want to be able to refer back to the exact resource in string arguments to other pods.

It sounds like you're doing the right thing. We have an example <https://github.com/pulumi/examples/blob/35caae8d73c3ecb0eac1256ba0e03775f24514da/aws-ts-eks-hello-world/index.ts#L27-L37|here> where we create a namespace (which will be autonamed) then create a variable with the name in and then use that name in a deployment.  Take a look at that

(I know you're talking about a job and I'm talking about a namespace but it should be similar)

so do I understand right that what I should get from `job.metadata.name` is the auto-named resource name?

I do:
```wait_for_migration = k8s.core.v1.ContainerArgs(
    name=f"{base_name}-migrate-wait",
    image="groundnuty/k8s-wait-for:1.3",
    args=["job", migrations_job.metadata.name],
    image_pull_policy="IfNotPresent",
    **env,
)```
and when using that in init_containers of other pods, I get the following args when I `describe pod` those:
```    Args:
      job
      migration
    State:          Waiting
      Reason:       CrashLoopBackOff```


OHO! I think my problem was that I passed an explicit `name` to metadata on `migrations_job`.

which ... still auto-names the k8s resource, but leads the "plain" return value

the migration pod is named `migration-4hooo8ld-dkxqn`  and the name output seems to be `migration-4hooo8ld` ... what.

so the pods are named by k8s... so they're taking the name of the deployment and giving it a further autonaming suffix

hah, sorry: yep, the names do line up - I need the job's name after all, which is exactly the above.

so, it does work - just can't pass the metadata name to the resource (:

Would you mind opening an issue in this repo: <https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-kubernetes> it kinda feels like this is a bug