Stop your AI coding agents from fighting: file-level locking for shared codebases

Your team just adopted Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot. Three AI agents, one monorepo. And now your pull requests look like a war zone. Two agents edited the same config file. One rewrote a function the other was refactoring. A third added tests for code that no longer exists. The merge conflicts are brutal, and nobody knows which agent did what. This is the coordination problem, and it gets worse as you add more agents. Why git alone does not solve this Git catches conflicts after they happen. By the time you see a merge conflict, both agents have already done the work. One of them wasted time, tokens, and compute. What you need is prevention, not detection: Before an agent edits a file, it should claim that file Other agents should see the claim and work elsewhere When the work is done, the claim is released If an agent crashes, the claim expires automatically This is file-level locking, and it is the missing primitive for multi-agent codebases. How file-level locking works The conc