---
title: "Team work"
---

# Team work

How agent sessions register what they are working on in your organisation's team work registry, how overlaps with other teams' work are shown, and how to acknowledge them.

When agents of different teams work on one system, each governed agent session registers what it is doing in your organisation's team work registry in Govern, checks for overlap before it edits, and gets an advisory when another team's agent is changing the same file, the same symbol, something that depends on it, or the same area. Team work is advisory only: it never blocks a session, a turn or a tool call.

## What you need

- A signed-in session.
- Your organisation has turned the registry on for you. There is no setting in the Editor; the server's capability and your organisation's policy decide.
- A repository with a remote of the form `host/owner/name` over https or ssh.

Nothing else: when an agent session in such a repository starts working, it registers itself.

## What is shared

Only names: ids, repository and branch names, file paths, symbols and service names, and a short label of the work (at most 120 characters, refused when it looks like a secret). Never code, diffs or prompts; the registry client never reads a file. Names of sensitive files (environment files, keys, credentials, state files) never leave the machine. An area that would cover the whole repository is refused.

## How a work item lives

1. When a session's first turn starts, it declares a work item: repository, branch, base commit, label, the agent app and areas.
2. While it works, it sends heartbeats and the areas it is about to change or changed.
3. After 60 seconds with no new turn the item is paused (still shared); the next turn makes it active again.
4. When the session ends, the item is finished. If a heartbeat was missed for too long, Govern marks the item abandoned, and the next turn declares a new one.

Agents get four tools: `work_declare`, `work_check_overlap`, `work_update` and `work_ack_overlap`. They are told to call `work_check_overlap` before they start editing. An advisory reaches the agent as a few lines of data (team, agent, branch, label, level, shared areas), marked as data that never blocks the work.

## See and acknowledge overlaps

- Run **Show Team Work** to see who works on what in each repository. **Refresh Team Work** reads it again.
- In the Editor, the status bar item shows open overlaps. The Editor shows no notification; the Agents app shows one notification per burst and a title bar marker.
- A short note appears in the session's transcript when an overlap opens or changes. It is never sent to the model.
- Press **Acknowledge** on an overlap once you have seen it, or run **Acknowledge a Team Work Overlap...**. It records, under your name, that you did. An agent can acknowledge only when you confirmed that very call in the interface.

## Messages

| You see | What to do |
|---|---|
| "Team work is not turned on for you. Your organization decides this..." | Ask an administrator to turn the registry on for you. Nothing of yours is shared meanwhile. |
| "The team work registry cannot answer right now. Nothing was assumed to be allowed..." | Nothing; it is checked again by itself. If it stays, give the administrator the code and request id from Details. |
| "Keystone cannot be reached right now." | Check the connection or the proxy; it is retried automatically. |
| A session says "not registered, because the repository has no remote" | Add a remote (`git remote add origin <url>`). |
| A session says the remote's address cannot be named without its credentials | Use an https or ssh remote of the form `host/owner/name`. |
| "Work items are being declared too fast from this machine" | Wait a couple of minutes. |
| "You have too many live work items" or "Your organization has reached its limit" | Finish sessions you no longer use, or ask an administrator about the limit. |
| "This work item expired because it was not kept alive" | Nothing; the next turn declares a new item. |
| "Not acknowledged... no person confirmed this call" | Acknowledge it yourself on the Team work page. |

Codes and request ids are behind **Details**, and in the text **Copy** puts on the clipboard.

## Maturity

The page, the status item, the title bar marker and the notification are type-checked and their logic is tested; their layout, keyboard focus order and screen reader output have not yet been checked in a running window.