"Behind!": what a restaurant kitchen teaches parallel coding agents

memento Team — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 05:49:17 +0000

Run two or three Claude Code or Codex sessions on one repository and sooner or later one of them rewrites the file the other just fixed. Neither did anything wrong. Nobody told them who had what.

Kitchens solved this a long time ago with three cheap things. All three work for agents today, for free.

1. Stations: one worktree per session

A cook never works on another cook's board. Give each session its own board:

git worktree add ../app-auth -b auth
git worktree add ../app-billing -b billing

Each session starts in its own directory on its own branch. Two edits to the same file stop being a silent overwrite and become a merge you can read.

2. The rail: one claims file, written under a lock

Stations alone do not stop two cooks from making the same dish. The rail does: a ticket says what is being cooked and by whom. For agents, that is one file in the main checkout, say claims.md, one line per task:

auth-refresh | session-a | 2026-10-22T14:05Z

Add one rule to your CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md: before you start a task, read claims.md; if the task is there, pick another; if not, append your line. Append it under a lock, so two sessions cannot claim at once:

flock claims.md -c 'grep -q "^auth-refresh |" claims.md || echo "auth-refresh | session-a | $(date -u +%FT%RZ)" >> claims.md'

"Behind!": the claim has a lease

A ticket nobody is cooking goes back on the rail. Sessions die, hit their context limit, get closed at night. So a claim carries its time, and the rule says: a claim older than, say, two hours with no commit behind it is free to take. The last thing a session does before it stops is delete its own line.

What this does not fix

The rule lives in an instruction file, so a session can skip it. Put the check in a hook if it matters.
It only works on one machine, or where everyone mounts the same file.
Nobody sees the whole board at a glance; you read the file.

That is enough for a solo developer with a few sessions. It starts to hurt with several people, each with their own agents, on their own machines.

Disclosure: I build memento Team, which does this on your own machines: https://overflow.games/memento/?ref=devto

DEV Community: memento Team

"Behind!": what a restaurant kitchen teaches parallel coding agents

1. Stations: one worktree per session

2. The rail: one claims file, written under a lock

"Behind!": the claim has a lease

What this does not fix