Concurrent Agents

Steve runs many Claude Code and Codex sessions against this one checkout on purpose, often on the same branch or file. Default assumption on every task: the working tree is shared branch state. Read existing changes before editing them, and never reset, clean, stash, or overwrite local work without explicit authorization.

Read before you edit

Before touching a file that already has uncommitted changes, re-read it and build your edit on top of what's there. Landing your own complete fix over a peer's in-progress one has happened repeatedly — "another agent landed its own complete fix for the exact same bug in the exact same file, overwriting my in-progress edits on disk." There is no conflict, no warning; the edit vanishes.

Diagnosing "did someone revert my work" — correctly

git diff --stat line counts are not evidence of a revert — a refactor can show the same magnitude of deletions. An agent once announced a revert from stat counts alone and was wrong; it cost a full investigation to disprove. Before you say "reverted" out loud, run:

git log --oneline <base>..HEAD    # what actually landed, in order
git diff <base>..HEAD -- <path>   # the real hunks for the files in question

Read the hunks: a revert removes logic and puts nothing equivalent back; a refactor removes the same lines and adds different code doing the same job. Only the hunks tell you which happened — never --stat alone.

Shallow or grafted worktrees

Shallow clones and grafted worktrees do not have complete ancestry. Treat git log -S and git merge-base --is-ancestor results at their boundary as inconclusive; fetch complete history or verify the date through the remote commit or pull-request record before calling a change the first occurrence.

Never move branches without an explicit instruction

Don't create, switch, delete, reset, rebase, stash, or worktree-add a branch unless the user asked for that exact operation in the current task — it strands every other agent on it. This isn't a tool-level block anymore — .agents/skills/new-branch/SKILL.md carries it now, through an activation guard that refuses to fire unless the user explicitly asked for /new-branch or a fresh branch. That guard is what took unrequested branch creation from a recurring complaint to zero; read it before any branch operation instead of assuming a prohibition still lives at the tool layer.

Timing the next branch

Before running /new-branch, even on an explicit request, confirm that the current branch has been fully checkpointed and inspect the active worktrees:

git status --short
ls .claude/worktrees/ 2>/dev/null
gh pr list --head "$(git branch --show-current)" --state open

Run corepack pnpm ship:push for any nonignored changes before moving to the next branch. Do not leave local work behind during branch rotation.

Before you ship

Before you commit, push, or merge, check git log --oneline -5, git status, and gh pr list --head <branch> for the current PR. If the work you were about to do just landed, continue from the latest branch snapshot.

Reading a Codex peer's intent

Relaying between agents by hand is the user's most tedious job — don't make him paste what a Codex session is doing. Read its transcript yourself:

ls ~/.codex/sessions/YYYY/MM/DD/rollout-*.jsonl

Each line is a JSON event; payload.type == "user_message" is what the user asked, payload.type == "agent_message" is what it answered — enough to learn a peer's task without interrupting it or the user.

Related

• new-branch — the one workflow allowed to move branches, only on explicit /new-branch invocation.
• ship — the commit/push/PR workflow for the complete branch snapshot.