Dedicated machines over git worktrees
Why parallel agents got their own machines instead of shared worktrees.
🌿 Budding Planted 2026-06-05 Last tended 2026-06-16
Git worktrees looked like the clean way to run many coding agents in parallel from one repo. In practice, concurrent agents sharing a tree fought over the git index and stepped on each other’s in-progress edits — “worktrees ate my edits.”
The move that fixed it: give each parallel agent genuine isolation — a dedicated machine (or at minimum a fully isolated worktree on its own branch), never a shared working directory. Index contention and test interference both vanish when nothing is shared.
Longer write-up: Git Worktrees Ate My Edits — Why We Switched to Dedicated Machines.
Still chewing on
- Where the crossover is: how many parallel agents justify a dedicated box vs. an isolated worktree.
- Whether merge-time conflict handling should re-dispatch the losing unit rather than hand-resolve.