Two agents in one folder do not fight loudly

The first thing people try when they want two coding agents working at once is two terminals in the same folder. It is the obvious move and it looks fine for about ten minutes.

Then you read the diff. One agent edited a file while the other was halfway through rewriting it. One staged the other's half-finished work. The change in front of you is a blend of two intentions and neither agent meant it. Nothing errored. Nothing warned you. A session's working folder is just a path, and two sessions are allowed to hold the same one.

They do not fight loudly. That is the problem.

The fix is a folder each, and git already does it

A git worktree is a second working folder for a repository you already have, checked out on its own branch. It is not a second clone: one repository, one history, one set of remotes, and the extra folder simply holds a different branch. Creating one costs a checkout, not a download - which matters when you want four of them.

So each agent gets its own folder and its own branch. They cannot touch each other's files, because they are not in each other's files. The merge conflict, if there is one, happens at merge time where you can see it and reason about it, instead of at 11am inside a file neither of you was watching.

On Windows specifically

Most writing about running several coding agents at once assumes a Mac and a tmux session. Neither of those is where a lot of professional development happens. On Windows the manual version is a handful of terminal windows, each one cd'd somewhere different, none of them labelled, and a growing suspicion that you have lost track of which branch is which.

DevThrottle is a Windows desktop application. It drives git rather than replacing it - the worktrees it makes are ordinary git worktrees that your existing tooling understands - and it keeps track of which session is in which folder on which branch, so the answer to "what is this one working on" is on the screen rather than in your memory.

Where it stops being about folders

Isolation solves the collisions. It does not solve supervision, and supervision is the part that limits how many agents one person can run.

Four agents in four worktrees will still all stop and wait for you, at different times, for thirty seconds each, and you will still not know which one needs you without checking. That is the problem the rest of the product is about: a list that shows which session is waiting and for how long, the same list on your phone, and sessions that can ask each other instead of asking you.

Start with the folders, though. Parallel agents sharing a directory is the mistake that costs a morning, and it is the one that never announces itself.

Doing it

About ten minutes, with one repository you can push from: repositories and worktrees. For the shape of running several sessions side by side once they are isolated, see several at once.