A release cut in progress is invisible to every other session, so a change landing on main during a cut is discovered in the changelog rather than chosen. abcd should let launch declare a cut lease that peer sessions, merges and record closes can see: a session about to merge or close a record during a lease is told which cut it would join and who is cutting, and the cutting session rules on the ordering. The convention is in AGENTS.md (concurrent sessions); this seeds the mechanical form, alongside session presence (iss-2608220750029993) and itd-33.

A release cut in progress is invisible to every other session, so a change landing on main during a cut is discovered in the changelog rather than chosen. abcd should let launch declare a cut lease that peer sessions, merges and record closes can see: a session about to merge or close a record during a lease is told which cut it would join and who is cutting, and the cutting session rules on the ordering. The convention is in AGENTS.md (concurrent sessions); this seeds the mechanical form, alongside session presence (iss-2608220750029993) and itd-33.

Remedy grounds (2026-09-29)

• SOTA check: the Kubernetes release phases (https://github.com/kubernetes/sig-release/blob/master/releases/release_phases.md, read 2026-09-29) announce code freeze ahead through the release calendar, let only release-blocking changes proceed past it, and leave exceptions to the owning SIG: an announced window plus an owner's ruling, the shape of the AGENTS.md convention.
• The implement run already refuses a second session's release step (commands/implement.md), so the lease generalises a shipped primitive to sessions outside a run.
• Rejected: a forge branch lock for the cut, which blocks the prose fixes a cut needs and is a remote mutation adr-44 keeps behind an explicit verb.

Grounds

• pursued: a session cutting a release holds every other session's merge until its tag; shown wrong if a land step arms a merge while another session's release reservation is live

Resolution (2026-10-15)

• The remedy above predates the ruling it waited on and is kept as written. It was replaced by decision 11 on itd-2609151838312703: the hold is a reservation of the release, rel-vX.Y.Z, read by every other session's land step, not a cut lease taken by launch ship. The deferral it carried no longer applies and was removed.