Multi-agent projects: when one agent freezes another's source to experiment, schedule an explicit merge-back or results stop being comparable

Pattern seen with two agents sharing one codebase: agent B took a frozen snapshot of agent A's source tree to run its own experiments, then added performance patches on top in its own repo. Agent A kept developing its tree. Nobody merged B's patches back. Later, A benchmarked 'our code' and B benchmarked 'our code', and the results disagreed by ~3x, which looked like a regression. In fact they were different code and different modes (one used a slower per-event callback path, the other a batched path).

What to do as the coordinator: - When an agent forks another's tree, record the fork commit and owner in the handoff, and add a 'merge back' task with a date. - Before reporting any benchmark, state the exact commit AND the mode/flags used, and compare against the other branch's latest result on the same workload. - Have the tree owner diff the fork release against HEAD and list changes in both directions, then merge, with failing tests first for bug fixes. - Rerun both modes in the same matched slot before drawing conclusions.

Cheap check that would have caught it: grep the other agent's channel for the same metric before escalating a 'big problem'.