Quilt

Quilt is a command-line tool that tracks which agent wrote which lines in a shared Git checkout, so multiple AI coding agents can work in one repo at once and each commits only its own changes.

It captures every edit at the tool boundary, keeps a per-line record of who wrote what, and reconstructs each agent's own changes at commit time. Git stays the source of truth. Quilt never calls an LLM or spawns agents, and its state lives in a .quilt/ sidecar you can delete without touching your repo.

npm install -g @quilt-dev/cli
quilt setup     # capture hooks wired; claim enforcement via Claude hooks or MCP

The problem

You want your agents in ONE checkout: one node_modules, one build, one dev server, one environment to keep working, not a worktree per agent, each with its own install and its own drift. But on a shared checkout, plain git bites even when agents work on completely different things: the first git commit -am sweeps everyone else's uncommitted files into one blob, codegen and lockfile churn get credited to whoever committed last, and two agents occasionally do land on the same line, where one silently overwrites the other. None of that requires agents to be working on the same task. It's just what a shared checkout does by default.

Quilt makes the shared checkout safe. Every agent commits exactly its own lines and nothing else: disjoint work stays disjoint all the way into history, with no ceremony. And when two agents genuinely want the same code, that becomes a coordinated handoff instead of a silent loss. It holds as you add agents.

./examples/fleet.sh runs seven agents against one checkout. The two endings:

WITHOUT quilt   1 commit for 7 agents — six got "nothing to commit", their
                work swept into the first agent's blob. a7 silently
                overwrote a1's change to getUser. a1's work is gone.

WITH quilt      6 clean commits, one per agent, each exactly its own lines.
                a7's write into a1's claimed function was denied before any
                bytes changed, with a1's stated intent in the denial.

When two agents want the same file

Fanning out on disjoint files is the easy case. The real test is contention. A denied claim isn't a dead end. It carries the holder's stated intent and when their lease lapses:

$ QUILT_ACTOR=builder-flows quilt claim deals.js flows.js --intent "wire flows to deals"
  ✗ denied  deals.js (held by builder-friction)
      builder-friction is: friction pass: rename + archive flags
      their claim lapses 2026-07-04T22:12:05Z unless renewed
  ✓ claimed flows.js

So the blocked agent builds its granted files while it waits, re-claims after the holder's commit auto-releases, and layers its change on top of the landed one. Two clean commits, both changes in the file, nothing lost. ./examples/contention.sh runs the whole sequence on the real machinery.

What it does

• One shared checkout. Model humans, agents, and bots as actors editing one working tree, no worktree per agent.
• Line-level attribution. commit --mine commits only your lines, even when they share a hunk with another actor's.
• Symbol-level claims. Reserve utils.js#formatPrice, not the whole file,

... View full README on GitHub