Claims

You’ve done this dance: you ask Claude Code to refactor src/auth/, and twenty minutes later you ask Codex to add an endpoint that touches the same file. Both agents work happily in parallel until merge time, when one set of changes silently overwrites the other. Tokens wasted, work lost.

A claim fixes this. Before an agent edits, brainclaw locks the scope (a folder, a file glob, a plan id). The second agent that tries to claim the same scope sees the conflict immediately — not after both have finished. Each claim also gets its own isolated Git worktree, so even when scopes don’t overlap, the agents never share node_modules or trip on each other’s npm install.

# Agent A claims auth refactor scope
bclaw_work intent=execute scope="src/auth/"

# Agent B asks for an overlapping scope
bclaw_work intent=execute scope="src/auth/middleware.ts"
# → conflict surfaced before any edit happens

Result: parallel work without merge roulette. See the pattern in context: parallel feature work.