Work in an external repository

The work is wanted somewhere else — another repository, on this machine or not yet on it — and every way that goes wrong is quiet. The agent edits a checkout whose directory has the right name and belongs to a fork. It works directly in a checkout another session is holding. It branches off a base ref last fetched in a different month. It clones to a path it invented, producing a second copy nobody will find. And at the end it reports two commits and a green test run without ever naming a repository, so the reader — looking at their own terminal — concludes the work landed here.

None of these announce themselves. Every command succeeds, the diff looks right, and the damage surfaces in somebody else's session or in a pull request that conflicts from its first line.