Worker Isolation

Patterns for preventing coordination collapse through strict agent isolation.

When to Use

• Scaling beyond 4-10 agents
• Preventing "helpful" agents from touching things they shouldn't
• Enabling 100+ agent parallelism (like Cursor's 1M-line codebase)
• Stopping the 41-50% rework rate from uncontrolled agents

Core Principle

"Most LLM 'hallucinations' in coding occur because the agent tries to be 'helpful' by changing things it wasn't asked to touch."

Strict scoping is the only way to achieve reliable multi-agent parallelism.

The Three Isolation Layers

Layer 1: Context Isolation (MVC)