Rule
Every concurrent worker gets a lane: an isolated workspace and exclusive ownership of the files it may edit. One lane, one owner. A claim on a task list does not lock a file.
Write-scope ownership is the license for parallelism. Two agents can work at full speed only when neither can touch what the other owns. Isolation also makes workers disposable: when a sealed-off worker fails, delete it, spawn a fresh one, reassign the job. The tracked task is durable. The worker is disposable.
Put It to Work
- Give each worker its own isolated checkout of the repo.
- Assign disjoint file ownership before parallel work starts; combine tasks that touch the same file.
- Keep conversation history and tool state separate per worker.
- Integrate through review, tests, and explicit merge steps. Shared mutable state is not a coordination channel.
Failure Signal
- Two workers edit the same surface because "the task list said it was theirs."
- One agent reads another's uncommitted changes and treats them as baseline.
- A failed worker leaves shared state that changes another worker's output.
- Merge conflicts become the primary coordination mechanism.
Done Looks Like
Each worker can succeed or fail independently inside its own lane, and integration happens through a deliberate gate.