Concepts

Remotehost Claims has two halves over one substrate — git and the filesystem.

The two pillars

The skill engine autonomously creates and maintains a repo's agent skill files so they never drift from how the repo actually works. It watches how people use agents in a repo and updates the skill files to match, continuously, with no human in the loop.

The coordination layer — the rest of this page — lets many agents work in one repo without colliding: real-time presence, claim arbitration, and conflict prediction.

Actor

The principal that holds claims and authors commits — an agent session, a human, or a human-plus-agent pairing. One identity model covers a single operator running a fleet of agents and a team whose members each run their own:

Actor = {
  actor_id      // stable id, unique per repo coordinator
  kind          // "agent" | "human" | "human+agent"
  agent_vendor? // claude-code | codex | cursor | aider | ... (informational only)
  session_id?   // ephemeral run id
  display       // "agent-12" | "Rachel" | "Rachel · Claude"
}

Task

A unit of work, registered under .claims/tasks/<id>.yaml with a status, a base branch, and a branch name derived from your configured pattern (agent/{task_id}-{slug} by default).

Claim

A declared, arbitrated intent to write a set of paths on a branch, with a lease. Claims are granted by the coordinator in a total order:

• INVARIANT-1 — no two actors ever simultaneously hold overlapping write-claims.
• INVARIANT-2 — no change that violates a live claim can land on a protected branch.

exclusive_paths (for example package.json or migration files) are hard-locked — only one actor at a time, no exceptions. shared_paths (for example docs/**) allow overlap with a warning instead of a denial.

Coordinator

The linearizable, per-repo arbiter that grants claims. The CLI talks to it through one interface with five operations (claim, renew, release, verify-land, state), and two things implement that interface:

• The local arbiter — the default. The CLI serializes every invocation on this machine through one lock, so claims are arbitrated in a total order and the land gate is enforced across branches, worktrees and clones here. Zero setup, no account; the guarantee stops at the machine boundary.
• Remotehost Claims Cloud — the same contract served across machines, for a team whose agents run on many laptops, sandboxes and CI runners. Installed as a separate package and enabled by claims login; adds a live dashboard, org policy and the shared skill registry.

Agent-agnostic by design

Remotehost Claims treats every agent as an opaque, possibly-changing black box and binds only to the two layers no vendor controls: the filesystem and git. An agent that has never heard of Remotehost Claims still cannot land a conflicting change, because the gate lives at the git layer, not inside the agent.