The Incident: It Was Written, and Now It Is Gone
The Dream Team keeps one shared status note that all the bots write to. The bot on the Windows device and the bot on the Mac mini each leave a line there whenever they finish a task. One week something felt off. Lines that had clearly been written were missing the next day. At first I suspected a bot had been filing false reports.
The Cause: Both Opened It at Nearly the Same Time
Digging through the logs, the culprit was simple. Two bots opened the same file around the same moment, each added its own line, and each saved. Whoever saved last overwrote everything the earlier one had saved. Nine lines vanished in a single week. Neither bot did anything wrong. Nobody had told them who goes first.
The Fix: Two Rules
1. Before editing the file, write one line at the very top: 「working: bot name, time」. If a line is already there, wait 5 minutes.
2. Each bot edits only the section under its own name. Other bots' sections are read-only.
working: mac-mini-bot, 14:05
When the work is done, delete that line. That is all. No complicated locking system and no extra tools.
The Result
The following week only 1 line was lost, down from 9. That one was a side effect of a day when a bot forgot to delete its marker and the other bot waited too long. Waiting a little costs far less than losing content.
Takeaway
In a human team, a phrase like 「I'm editing this file right now」 comes out naturally. For bots, that sentence only exists if you write it down as a rule. Light promises like this are the ones that last.