Preserve Unowned Work
preserve-unowned-work
Summary
Shared working copies may contain edits from another person or an earlier task. Check state before editing, work around unrelated changes, and stop for direction when unowned work blocks the current change.
Problem
Shared working copies can contain edits made by someone else or by an earlier task. Treating those edits as cleanup noise can lose work, widen the diff, or make review history misleading.
Preferred Move
Check the working-copy state before editing. Reread files before patching them, work around unrelated edits, and keep your change focused on files and lines needed for the current chunk.
Tradeoff
Preserving unowned work can leave a stack less tidy than a clean rewrite. If another change blocks the task, stop and ask for direction instead of guessing which work should win.
Agent Instruction
Do not overwrite, revert, or absorb changes you did not make. If unowned work blocks the requested
change, report the conflict and ask how to proceed.Examples
Bad: the agent resets a file because unrelated edits make the diff untidy.
Reverted docs/site-plan.md to clean up the patch.
Good: the handoff names the unowned edit and leaves it intact.
Left docs/site-plan.md unchanged because it had pre-existing edits outside this task.