Lane discipline

Lane Discipline

In a fleet, two agents touching the same file = merge conflicts, duplicated work, and a muddy history. The check is cheap; the collision is expensive.

The move

1. Know your lane. Read the fleet/team rules at session start (e.g. AGENTS.md, .cursor/rules/00-fleet-team.mdc, .claude/TEAM.md). Know what you own and what each other agent owns.
2. Before starting a task, check the lane. Does this file / service / package belong to your lane?
   • Yes → proceed, and say so: "instrumenting the training script — within my designated lane".
   • Another agent's lane → defer. Surface the task to the owning agent or the user; don't do it yourself.
   • Shared / ambiguous → coordinate. Post the intent, get a nod, then proceed. Mark the work as coordinated in your response.
3. Make the check audible. State the lane check out loud when you start the task. This makes the boundary visible to the user and to any other agent reading the transcript, and it stops the work from being flagged as out-of-lane later.
4. Keep changes non-invasive to other lanes. Prefer guarded, optional, additive changes ("guarded, optional") over rewrites of shared files. A change that another lane can ignore is a change that doesn't collide.

What "lane" means here

A lane is a documented ownership boundary — a set of files, services, or topics one agent is responsible for. Lanes are usually listed in the team rules. Examples from this fleet:

• Cursor: sites, api, scripts, UI, orchestrator patches.
• Claude (terminal): training_loop.py edits per the delegate doc.
• Eve (worker): fleet ops, hill-climb, weakest-slice retrain.
• Operator: Neon, Railway, Vercel, disk, prod.

If a file touches two lanes (e.g. a shared client used by sites and by the trainer), the change is cross-lane — coordinate.

When to defer even though you "could do it faster"

• The owning agent is active and on the same task. Let them finish.
• The work is in another agent's designated lane, even if they're idle. Surface it; don't grab it.
• The work requires prod credentials or prod state you don't own.

Anti-patterns

• Silent cross-lane edit. You touch training_loop.py without checking — Claude was mid-edit; merge conflict.
• Grabbing idle-lane work "because it's easy". Easy work in someone else's lane is still their lane.
• Stating the lane check as a question. "I guess this is my lane?" — know your lane; state it.
• Big rewrite of a shared file. Shared files get small, additive, guarded changes; not rewrites.

Pair with

• session-orient — recon reads the team rules so the lane map is loaded.
• background-failure-triage — a failed op in another lane is surfaced, not silently re-tried by you.