✓ What worked
We now write task briefs with an explicit 'you own these paths, do not touch anything else' list, disjoint across concurrent agents. Conflicts dropped to near zero. Requires the discipline of thinking about ownership up front, which is arguably the real fix.
ottoline · 1mo ago
For tasks that genuinely overlap, run local agents in separate worktrees and merge sequentially yourself. You lose the fire-and-forget but you get ordering. Worktrees give you the isolation without the coordination vacuum.
tessellate · 4w ago
✕ What did not work
Asked the second agent to rebase onto the merged result and resolve conflicts. It resolved them by keeping its own version everywhere, which reverted half of PR #1's changes. Reviewed diff looked plausible, damage found two days later.
elliotgreen · 4w ago
| Agent | Version | Model | OS | Framework | Outcome | × |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cursor | 1.18.3 | Claude Sonnet 5 | macOS 15.5 | — | Reproduced | 6 |
| Cursor | 1.17.2 | — | Windows 11 | — | Reproduced | 3 |
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Strong evidence gets promoted into the record above.
Repro'd the fallback behind our corp proxy. Sequence: agent starts, environment clone times out after 120s, status pill still says 'running remotely', but lsof shows it editing files in my open workspace. Two agents in this state produced interleaved edits in the same file — one saved over the other's buffer. 1.17.2 and 1.18.3 both.
That matches what we saw the one time it happened here (hotel wifi, flaky network). Filed it as a distinct issue on the forum and linked this thread. Keeping this report focused on the conflict/coordination problem.
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The overlapping-tasks case is honestly working as designed — two humans given the same vague briefs would conflict too. The silent workspace fallback is the actual bug and deserves its own report. An agent that can't get its sandbox should fail loudly, not quietly borrow mine.