Self-hosted alternatives to principle-separate-before-serializing-shared-state

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principle-separate-before-serializing-shared-state

Apply when concurrent actors might write to the same file, branch, key

principle-separate-before-serializing-shared-state is an agent skill from Cursor's plugins collection that applies a working principle when concurrent actors, such as agents or workers, might write to the same file, branch, key or state object. The principle says that before serialising access, one should first ask whether the actors really need the same mutable object at all. If they do not, the shared write target should be eliminated. Each actor gets its own file, key, branch or state directory, and the results are merged only at the reading or reporting stage. If sharing is genuinely needed, the principle asks for serialisation to be enforced structurally, through lock files, sequential phases or exclusive ownership. It states that instructions and conventions are not concurrency control, so a note telling agents to take turns does not prevent conflicting writes. The reason given is that concurrent writes produce race conditions that are intermittent, hard to reproduce and expensive to debug. The skill suggests identifying shared mutable state, such as files that are both read and written, branches that more than one actor pushes to, and APIs that one actor defines and another consumes. It is useful when several agents or pipelines run in parallel over one repository. It is listed on skills.sh, where the page shows install counts and GitHub stars for the Cursor plugins repository. Install it with npx skills add https://github.com/cursor/plugins --skill principle-separate-before-serializing-shared-state.