Outcome ownership
Exact path matching is supplemented by a bounded semantic overlap check that can stop ambiguous duplicate work.
Submitted Build Week prototype · Developer Tools
Parallel agents need clearance before speed.
Gatehold gives cooperative coding agents one local authority for overlapping workstreams, heavy-job capacity, exclusive resources and cleanup before a lane can be reused.
StatusSubmitted on Devpost; public no-account replay and real local daemon source available.
ProblemWorktrees isolate files, not product ownership, host capacity or shared runtime surfaces.
MechanismClaim → deterministic preflight → owned lane → verified cleanup → release.
AuthorityOnly deterministic local policy grants clearance; GPT-5.6 may add a hold.
Problem and mechanism
A lane is not free until its owned work is clean.
Gatehold combines workstream leases, FIFO capacity admission and exclusive runtime ownership. A released or expired task does not clear merely because an agent says it is done; owned processes, ports, profiles and exact simulator state must reach a verified end condition.
- ClaimOne TTL-bound owner holds an overlapping protected outcome.
- CapacityHeavy work waits in deterministic order when the workstation has no headroom.
- RuntimePorts, profiles and exact simulator IDs belong to one governed lane.
- CleanupAmbiguous residue is quarantined rather than guessed away.
Verified public evidence
Replay the lifecycle, then inspect the local implementation.
The replay works offline with bounded data. The source path contains the Python daemon, transactional SQLite admission engine, CLI, supervisor, React desk and reusable Codex skill.
What the work demonstrates
Coordination is an authority problem, not another dashboard.
The core value is the lifecycle contract behind the interface: who may start, what must wait and when ownership can safely move.
Capacity before execution
Heavy jobs queue instead of independently overloading one workstation, while light work can remain available.
Cleanup before release
Authority remains held until the governed task's owned runtime surfaces are verified clean or explicitly quarantined.
Authority boundary
GPT-5.6 can make Gatehold more conservative, never more permissive.
The model can identify semantic overlap between differently worded claims and add a review hold. It cannot grant clearance, remove a deterministic conflict, bypass FIFO capacity, transfer ownership or declare cleanup complete.
Public modeSynthetic replay; it does not inspect the visitor's machine.
Local modeLoopback daemon and current host probes under explicit local ownership.
Build Week 2026
See the complete bounded-authority collection.
ProofLatch governs release evidence, ExitCanary tests SaaS exit fidelity and AccessCrash tests human reachability.