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Coordination and ownership

Who holds what, who is doing what right now, and what happens where two workers meet.

Coordination and ownership

Several workers, one repository. This area covers everything that goes wrong because ownership is implicit: duplicated work, work undone by the next worker, tasks nobody holds, and the collisions that isolation defers rather than prevents.

Two workers independently fixing one defect are not evidence of powerful parallelism. They are evidence that ownership was never declared anywhere both could see.

6 moments

Every moment that names this one. Derived from the moments; this page keeps no list.

  1. found two agents fixing the same bug in two branchesTwo workers spend a day each on one defect because ownership was implicit and neither could see the other. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  2. found a task "in progress" that nobody had touched for three weeksA status that was authored rather than computed is true at the moment of writing and decays silently from then on. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  3. watched one worker revert another worker's change, on purposeA worker sees an unexplained change in its path, judges it wrong, and removes it — correctly, on the evidence it had. cost: highoccasional Why, and what to do →
  4. found five worktrees and could not say which of them still matteredIsolation is cheap to create and expensive to reason about: nothing records what a worktree was for or whether its work landed. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  5. found finished work on a branch that nobody ever mergedWorkers produce far more than integration absorbs, and nothing distinguishes work that is done from work that is done and landed. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  6. had two sessions writing into one checkout without either knowingTwo workers in one working tree see each other only as unexplained file changes, and each treats the other as noise. cost: highoccasional Why, and what to do →