G-15Integrating Parallel Work

/coding-agents/integrating-parallel-work

Where two isolated agents’ branches meet — and who holds both intentions well enough to resolve them.

Step-by-step walkthrough8 steps

Two agents, two worktrees, no shared filesystem. That part works.
Each commits to its own branch, unaware of the other.
Both happened to touch the same config file. Neither had any way to know.
The first branch merges cleanly. Parallelism looks like it worked.
The second lands on a file that no longer looks the way its author left it.
Git surfaces the conflict — which is the good outcome. Silent overwriting was the alternative.
Resolving it needs both intentions at once, and neither agent has ever seen the other’s.
So integration is its own role — one place that holds both changes, not a ping-pong between authors.

Key insight

Worktrees make isolation cheap, which is the easy half. The merge is the hard half, and it needs a role: one integrator holding both changes, rather than a conflict bounced between authors who have each seen only their own.

Failure mode

Handing a conflict back to the agent that wrote one side. It resolves in favour of its own branch, because its context contains no reason not to.

G-15Integrating Parallel Work

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