FIELD NOTE / INSTAGRAM
A fleet needs traffic rules.
The complete written thought and the evidence behind it. The video edition will follow its public release.
The written argument is here.
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A fleet needs traffic rules.
Video caption
A fleet needs traffic rules.
Scope, owner, evidence and integration.
Watch whether agents stop and escalate.
Parallel output needs serialized acceptance.
#EricFieldNotes
Full written post / accessibility read
Give six agents one checkout and you invite file conflicts. Give them six worktrees and you prevent many file collisions, but they can still implement six incompatible product assumptions. Agent-to-agent messages need sourced decisions, ownership and a merge gate, not just separate folders.
Each agent gets one worktree, a bounded task, the current source-linked decision and a protected acceptance target. It reports changed artifact, tests, uncertainty and integration dependencies. A supervisor can route messages and monitor stale assumptions. One named integrator decides whether branches belong together.
In a disposable repo, tell one worker a tenant exception expires Friday and another that it has no expiry. Their branches may both pass local tests. The coordination layer should surface the source conflict before merge; independent CI should reject a build that violates the approved customer decision.
My rule: let agents work in isolated branches, share compact source-backed handoffs and converge at a trusted merge gate. Do this because physical file isolation prevents overwrites but cannot settle which product promise is correct.
#EricFieldNotes
Four-beat scene transcript
1. A fleet needs traffic rules.
Give six agents one checkout and you invite file conflicts. Give them six worktrees and you prevent many file collisions, but they can still implement six incompatible product assumptions. Agent-to-agent messages need sourced decisions, ownership and a merge gate, not just separate folders.
Visual: Worktrees solve only one collision.
2. Assign four controls per lane.
Each agent gets one worktree, a bounded task, the current source-linked decision and a protected acceptance target. It reports changed artifact, tests, uncertainty and integration dependencies. A supervisor can route messages and monitor stale assumptions. One named integrator decides whether branches belong together.
Visual: Scope, owner, evidence and integration.
3. Inject a conflicting decision.
In a disposable repo, tell one worker a tenant exception expires Friday and another that it has no expiry. Their branches may both pass local tests. The coordination layer should surface the source conflict before merge; independent CI should reject a build that violates the approved customer decision.
Visual: Watch whether agents stop and escalate.
4. Keep one source of authority.
My rule: let agents work in isolated branches, share compact source-backed handoffs and converge at a trusted merge gate. Do this because physical file isolation prevents overwrites but cannot settle which product promise is correct.
Visual: Parallel output needs serialized acceptance.
Research and claim limits
- OpenAI Agents SDK/Codex orchestration example (S07)
- GitHub Docs: ruleset required status checks (S146)
The examples identified as illustrative or simulated are design probes, not reported incidents. Vendor specifications do not establish workload performance.