Concurrency Problems When Running Multiple AI Agents in a Shared Git Repository

Short summary

Running multiple AI coding agents in a single git checkout creates concurrency problems—branch hijacking, orphaned commits, staging contamination, and duplicate implementation—because the shared working directory acts like a global variable. The author solved this with three defenses: git worktree isolation per session, pre-commit branch verification, and scoped verification gates limited to each session's own changes. The core insight is that parallel agents need the same isolation and concurrency control that databases and multithreaded programs have required for decades.

• •Shared git checkouts cause race conditions between parallel AI agents: branch hijacking, orphaned commits, staging contamination, duplicate work
• •Three defenses: git worktree isolation, pre-commit branch re-checking, scoped verification gates
• •Parallel agent coordination is fundamentally a concurrency-control problem analogous to database isolation

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