Developer builds JSON claim protocol to stop parallel AI agents from overwriting each other

A developer running multiple AI agent sessions in parallel on the same machine discovered that agents were silently overwriting each other's work despite operating in separate project repositories. An audit revealed five collisions, all caused by agents ignoring signs of concurrent activity in shared files and configs outside their home directories. To fix this, the developer replaced informal per-project status notes with a standardized JSON claim file system, requiring any agent to register a claim before writing outside its own project tree. The protocol uses four operations — take, renew, release, and refuse — with stale or missing heartbeats allowing another session to safely acquire the claim. A key lesson emerged during testing: a guard that silently fails and still reports success is more dangerous than having no guard at all.