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Parallel isn’t always safe.

A decision surface for the moment parallel AI tasks stop being isolated work and need to converge into one change a developer can trust.

Written from practice↓ Read the field note

An independent interaction experiment for agentic development environments. It examines the moment when several useful task loops become one product decision: can their output converge safely, and who is accountable for the answer?

The interesting moment is between tasks

Most agent interfaces make individual task progress visible: each agent has a plan, a worktree, a diff and a state. That is necessary, but it leaves a harder moment unresolved: two independent tasks can still alter the same contract.

The prototype starts when that overlap becomes legible. It is not a generic fleet dashboard. It is a short decision surface for a developer who needs to keep useful work moving without treating a green status as proof of a safe merge.

Show the boundary, not just the activity

Three tasks run in isolated worktrees. The interface maps each to the file it is changing, then elevates the shared session contract where their work begins to depend on one another.

This creates a useful distinction between independence and compatibility. A task can be healthy in its own environment while still needing to wait, sequence or invite a human decision before it joins another task.

Make a coordination choice consequential

The controls replay three plausible moves. Keep the tasks parallel and accept a conflict surface; queue the dependent test task after the migration; or open a review gate because the question is product behaviour, not execution order.

Each choice changes the recommendation, task state, risk and cost of review. The goal is not to automate judgement. It is to give the developer an understandable set of trade-offs at the point where their judgement matters.

Turn the hypothesis into reproducible evidence

The coordination replay is modelled, but its evidence is not invented. A small Node script reads three real commits from this portfolio with git diff-tree, records their parent hashes and changed files, then writes the snapshot used by the prototype.

The script finds three files touched by all three changes: the route, the component and the stylesheet. That does not prove the changes would conflict, but it gives the interface a defensible reason to surface a boundary. The generator and captured JSON are linked below.

This is still not an Air integration, and it does not pretend to observe live agent telemetry. The product hypothesis is narrower: if an agentic workspace already knows task scope, file context and execution isolation, it can help a developer recognise a risky convergence before review becomes expensive.

Evidence-backed product prototype

Parallel, not blind.

A decision surface for the moment parallel changes stop being isolated tasks and start becoming one change a developer must be able to trust.

deboramoratalla-lab/portfolio3 commit ranges · 3 shared files
Git evidence captured
[ Task map ]Worktrees remain isolated until merge
01
T-01 · Git change set · captured revision

Discovery layer

src/app/api/opportunity-radar/route.ts

READY
02
T-02 · Git change set · captured revision

Source layer

src/app/api/opportunity-radar/route.ts

RUNNING
03
T-03 · Git change set · captured revision

Context layer

src/app/api/opportunity-radar/company/route.ts

WAITING
Shared boundaryroute.tsGit overlap detected
Evidence boundary · Commit history and file overlap come from Git; the coordination replay is the product hypothesis. Developer remains accountable
[ Open materials ]

What you can reuse.

Not just a conclusion: these are the working artefacts behind the argument. Open them, question them and adapt what is useful.

01

Snapshot generator

A small Node script that reads commit-level changed files with git diff-tree and writes the evidence used in the replay.

Read the generator
02

Captured Git evidence

The committed snapshot: source commits, parent hashes and the files changed by each task-shaped change set.

Inspect the snapshot
03

Interaction prototype

The client component that keeps the evidence separate from the coordination scenarios it lets someone explore.

Read the prototype