A techlead agent per project, and it never pauses a demand
When a project has two or more active demands, an orchestrator agent watches for overlap, dependencies and interference, plans a solution and brings the developer a decision — without stopping any demand while it waits.
What was on the table
Parallel demands in one project produce situations no single demand’s agent observes: two branches touching the same files, one demand depending on another’s result, a behaviour change in one that breaks the other’s premise. Something has to see across demands, and detecting must not become blocking.
The paths we weighed
Static rules only — a path diff plus a declared dependency graph. Kept as sensors; insufficient for interference in behaviour, which needs a semantic reading of specs and diffs.
Pausing demands at risk until a decision. Rejected: it serialises the parallelism the platform exists for.
A human techlead. Rejected: that is the attention the platform is meant to spare.
What we chose, and why
Every project has an orchestrator agent — the techlead of the demand agents. It wakes when the project has two or more active demands, runs on the platform rather than in a sandbox, and observes the event log, the branches’ state and the demands’ flows.
It plans before it asks. On detecting a cross-cutting situation it produces options with a recommendation and opens an attention item, never a raw alarm. The developer’s choice becomes a coordination directive, an event visible in the threads involved: sequencing with a cherry-pick or rebase between branches, a preferred order in the merge queue, file partitioning, cross verification. The vocabulary is extensible.
A detected situation never pauses a demand. The demand proceeds as far as it can; when the directive’s condition is met it applies the coordination and continues. A block exists only when the demand itself has exhausted what can be done, and is then its own attention item.
What it cost
Observation is cheap and event-driven; planning is routed as an investigation. Directives are new state between demands and must appear in the timeline and in both threads.
Since then
The techlead belongs to the part of the platform that executes rather than models, which the roadmap places after the agent’s tools; flows and reactions as data are the vocabulary a directive will be written in.