🔒 Lock Folder Util — The Mutex Your Agent Swarm Desperately Needs
Twelve Agents. One Resource. Zero Supervision. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? You know that moment when you finally parallelise your agent fleet and watch with pride as twelve subagents sprint off to do the work of a whole team... straight into the same shared resource. Maybe it is the one licensed tool seat. Maybe it is the office coffee machine you told everyone could "handle concurrent…
Twelve agents seek a shared resource, each operating independently. Concurrency creates chaos: interleaved commands corrupt work, audit trails vanish, and crashed agents leave resources locked indefinitely. A simple Python script called lock_folder_util.py emerges as the answer. It creates an empty directory as an atomic mutex. Upon entry, the script runs mkdir .tmp/lock.lock, ensuring simultaneous access is impossible.
When finished, rmdir removes the lock. The script autonomously breaks stale locks after a defined period, with log entries detailing each action. Zero dependencies, a standard Python installation suffices. Whether macOS, Linux, or another system, mkdir's atomicity ensures portability. The script even includes a configurable lock directory and timed-out failure handling.
Twelve agents now coordinate their resource usage without conflict, leaving a clear audit trail and ensuring no resource remains locked forever.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
