Development record
2026-10-03 — Reserving work across people (product thinker, at an interactive interview, with a second person now working on this public repository). Rulings: anything kept on one computer (the local tier, a desktop note, same-account messaging) is never the record of who works on what, because the other person never sees it; an item is reserved by a reservation branch on the shared remote, `abcd-reserved/<record-id>`, which abcd lists and nobody merges, chosen over a hidden ref because a hosted cloud session can push branches only (probe of 2026-10-03 and the host's documentation); a hosted cloud session takes part exactly as a second person's machine does; itd-2609091034175565 is planned and built today with every acceptance criterion, and the session register itd-2609150819440345 stays a draft for later; outside contributors, who cannot push a claim branch, are the follow-up itd-2610031259176838, not urgent. The ruling of 2026-09-22 ("Cross-account and cross-machine agent communication stays out of the run") covered the run of 2026-09-23 only, confirmed by the product thinker today, so nothing is overturned. The 2026-09-09 ruling's two-release migration for a `claimed_by` stamp does not arise, because no stamp is written on any record (decided without a question: one defensible answer). The research and both reviews are filed as research/notes/2026-10-03-multi-agent-coordination-sota-and-run-lessons.md.
2026-10-03 — Reserving work across people (product thinker, at an interactive interview, with a second person now working on this public repository). Rulings: anything kept on one computer (the local tier, a desktop note, same-account messaging) is never the record of who works on what, because the other person never sees it; an item is reserved by a reservation branch on the shared remote, abcd-reserved/<record-id>, which abcd lists and nobody merges, chosen over a hidden ref because a hosted cloud session can push branches only (probe of 2026-10-03 and the host's documentation); a hosted cloud session takes part exactly as a second person's machine does; itd-2609091034175565 is planned and built today with every acceptance criterion, and the session register itd-2609150819440345 stays a draft for later; outside contributors, who cannot push a claim branch, are the follow-up itd-2610031259176838, not urgent. The ruling of 2026-09-22 ("Cross-account and cross-machine agent communication stays out of the run") covered the run of 2026-09-23 only, confirmed by the product thinker today, so nothing is overturned. The 2026-09-09 ruling's two-release migration for a claimed_by stamp does not arise, because no stamp is written on any record (decided without a question: one defensible answer). The research and both reviews are filed as research/notes/2026-10-03-multi-agent-coordination-sota-and-run-lessons.md.
Frontmatter
| id | dcn-2610030000000001 |
|---|---|
| type | decision |
| date | 2026-10-03 |
.abcd/work/decisions/dcn-2610030000000001-reserving-work-across-people-product.md
open on GitHub ↗ · commit history ↗
mentions3
- itd-2609091034175565Before an agent starts on an item, it reserves it on the shared remote, and everyone who works on the project sees the reservation
- itd-2609150819440345Which session holds which worktree, branch or record is coordinated entirely by conversation, so every new session repeats a handshake that nothing records. A session joining work in progress has no way to ask what is already claimed: it messages the peers it can see, waits for replies, and rebuilds a picture that the sessions before it had already built and did not write down. One measured encounter cost four messages and about fifteen minutes before any work began, and the picture it produced is not durable, so the session after that pays again. The convention that a diff you did not make is a peer's work depends on knowing who the peers are and what they hold, which is precisely the thing no artefact carries. The repository already records this gap for the narrow case of detecting a peer session before mutating git state; the wider case is claim rather than presence, and the two want the same substrate. Whatever holds it should be as cheap to write as it is to read, because a coordination record nobody updates is worse than the chat it replaced.
- itd-2610031259176838Outside contributors reserve work through a draft pull request that abcd honours