Lanes

Lanes keeps your team's coding agents out of each other's way when they all work in one repository.

trylanes.app · Live demo · Install · CLI · MCP · Numbers

The problem

On a team where everyone runs a coding agent, several agents edit the same repository at once. They overwrite each other's changes, and one calls a function that a teammate's agent is renaming right now. Nobody can see what the other agents are doing until the merge goes wrong.

What Lanes does

• File leases and a queue. An agent takes a lease on a file before it edits it. A second agent that wants the same file waits in a short queue, gets the newer version, and then goes ahead. Lanes never refuses an edit: if the server is down or the wait runs out, the edit goes ahead uncoordinated.
• Shared team context. Each prompt gets a short team brief: who works on what, and new chat messages. Before an agent edits or reads a file a teammate is changing, it gets a one-line heads-up. Off until you turn it on per repository.
• Requests between agents. You can ask a teammate's agent to do something. It reaches their agent only after they approve it. The MCP server has no approve tool, so only a person can approve.
• Everything visible, no editor required. The CLI, the MCP server and a browser app served by your Lanes server all show the same team: agents, held files, tasks, chat and requests. A VS Code extension adds the same view as a sidebar, if you want it.
• Works with your agents. Claude Code is run live. Eleven more agents work through their own hooks or plugins: Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Kiro, Antigravity, Factory Droid, Qwen Code, opencode, Kilo Code and Amp. Seven more get the team tools through MCP only: Augment, Junie, JetBrains AI Assistant, Continue, Zed, Goose and Warp. Those 18 are built from each agent's docs and have not been run against the real agents yet.

More screenshots: the lane map, the light theme, the optional VS Code sidebar

Numbers

Measured, not estimated. 389 real Claude Code sessions, 108 benchmark runs with every run published, 419 automated tests on Linux, Windows and macOS.

	Without Lanes	With Lanes
A teammate renames a function while another agent writes a new caller: build broken	6 of 13 runs (46%), leases only	0 of 10 with shared context
An agent whose edit is refused stops and asks its human	31% (4 of 13)	1 of 216 sessions: edits are queued, never refused
Edits lost with 64 agents writing at once		0
Commits attributed to the right person		107 of 107
Time the check adds before an edit (p95)		39 ms Linux, 68 ms Windows

Each figure links to the file it comes from, with the setup and every run.

• Hook check under 100 ms at p95. The bundled hook, for an allowed edit, process start included, in CI: Linux 39 ms, Windows 68 ms, macOS 79 ms. Local git origin, so no network time. (hook latency)

• 64 agents and 60 viewers on one server. 0 lost edits, server memory at about 70 MB RSS, 0 refused edits. 7 edits stayed committed in their clone and waited for the next publish there. All of it on one Windows machine, with a script sending the hook events at a pace far busier than real agents. (scale test, 2 November 2026)

• Every server route under 2 ms at p99, except acquire. That includes the team brief, chat and requests; single task calls reached up to 73 ms. Acquire includes the wait in the queue. On hot files that wait grows with the number of agents: p99 of 33 to 44 s at 32 agents and about 100 s at 64. (same file, remaining limits)

• Intent benchmark, first round (3 November 2026, 3 runs per arm, Haiku). Scenarios where a new caller lands in a file the other agent never touches, so leases alone cannot help. Arm C is leases only, arm D adds team context as it was then. (results, method)

  Scenario	C	D
  I1: rename first, new caller 8 s later	0 of 3	1 of 3
  I2: new caller first, rename 8 s later	3 of 3	3 of 3
  I3: signature change, new caller 8 s later	2 of 3	0 of 3

  Team context as worded then did not fix the conflict. No agent in any run stopped to ask its user.

• Intent benchmark, second round (9 November 2026, 10 runs per arm, Haiku). Arm D2 is the team context that ships in 0.3.0: a heads-up when an agent reads a teammate's file, a one-time check at the end of a turn when a file it depends on changed, and new wording. Its success bar was fixed before any run (method, arm D2). On I1 and I3: 20 of 20 with team context, 17 of 20 without, in a round where the conflict showed up in fewer control runs than expected. A small difference, not proof. On I2, D2 passed 9 of 10 and C 10 of 10. (results)

Install

Lanes runs from the terminal. You need Node.js 22.18 or newer and git; the folder must be a git repository. VS Code is optional.

1. Get the CLI.

git clone https://github.com/mfmatozza/lanes
cd lanes && npm ci && npm run build
alias lanes="node $PWD/dist/lanes.cjs"

2. Set up your repository and turn on shared context. Push the commit so teammates get it.

cd your-repo
lanes init --agents claude,codex      # hooks for each agent you use (comma-separated)
lanes team on
lanes doctor                          # checks this machine and repository

3. Give your agent the team tools over MCP.

claude mcp add lanes -- node /path/to/lanes/dist/lanes.cjs mcp

Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and 15 more: docs/mcp.md. Lanes is also in the official MCP Registry as io.github.mfmatozza/lanes.

4. For a team, one person runs the server and invites the others:

lanes server --host 0.0.0.0
lanes invite bea                      # prints the join command for Bea

lanes app opens the team in your browser. Working alone, skip this step: the first agent session starts a local server.

Optional: the VS Code extension. It adds a sidebar with every agent, the tasks and the Team view, and carries the same CLI. Download lanes-0.3.0.vsix from the release and run code --install-extension lanes-0.3.0.vsix. Details in the extension README.

How it works

Lease and queue. Each agent's hook asks the Lanes server for a lease before an edit. If another agent holds the file, the request waits first come, first served. When the lease is handed over, the waiting agent's checkout is synced first, so it edits the newer version. See ADR-0006, ADR-0015 and ADR-0019.

Sync and publish. After each edit, the hook commits it as a checkpoint on the agent's branch and pushes it to lanes/main on your own git remote. A refused push means someone else was first, so the hook fetches, rebases and tries again. The Lanes server never sees code: it holds paths, names and statuses. See ADR-0021 and ADR-0022.

Team context. With lanes team on, the server builds a short brief for each prompt from the tasks, leases and chat it already holds, within a 2,000-character budget. Text written by a teammate is always quoted as data with its author named, never as an instruction. See ADR-0028.

The full picture: architecture overview and design decisions.

Privacy

• The Lanes server gets file paths, names and statuses. It also gets the team chat, requests, and each task title.
• A task title is the first line of a prompt, at most 120 characters, with secrets redacted. It is also the message of the checkpoint commits. LANES_NO_PROMPT_TEXT=1 replaces it with "Agent task".
• File contents never go to the Lanes server. They go only where they already go: your own git remote.
• There is no telemetry. A local counter (~/.lanes/ledger.jsonl, read with lanes report) holds counts and times, never paths, contents, prompts or names. It is never sent.

Status

0.3.0 is a beta, released on 11 November 2026.

• Run live: the VS Code extension, the server, the CLI, the browser app and the hooks with the real Claude Code.
• Built from docs, not yet run against the real agent: the hooks and plugins for the 11 other agents, and the MCP setup for 7 more. Cursor, Copilot and Kiro edits are shared right after the edit, not queued before it.
• Next: the extension on the VS Code Marketplace and Open VSX. Until then, install the .vsix from the release.
• Not built yet: end-to-end encryption for chat and requests, and a hosted server.

Release notes: CHANGELOG.

Documentation

• CLI reference
• MCP server
• Architecture
• Design decisions
• Benchmark method and results

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Report security issues privately, as described in SECURITY.md.

Licence

Apache-2.0.