LaneGate

Parallel lanes. Protected gates. Every agent gets a lane. Nothing ships without a gate.

LaneGate coordinates coding agents (Claude, Codex, Cursor, Kiro, aider, OpenHands, Ollama, …) working on one repo: every ticket gets its own git worktree, declared touches lock the files a ticket owns so a second agent can't claim them, and nothing reaches main without an approved review plus whatever guards you configure. Tickets are Markdown files in your repo. No SaaS, no external project state.

You want this if you've watched an agent merge something half-baked and found out two commits later, or you've had two agents clobber each other's edits in the same checkout.

The part most tools skip: pre_merge guards re-run against the merged result, not just the ticket's branch. Two tickets that each passed in isolation but break once combined get caught here — LaneGate resets main to its pre-merge commit and routes the ticket back to review instead of leaving a broken commit behind.

LaneGate doesn't plan or implement. Your agents and IDE do that; LaneGate runs the gate around them.

Security note. V1 provides git-level isolation and diff inspection. It does not sandbox agents at the OS level. Agents run as host processes. See Security Status and Known Limitations before running it on repositories you care about.

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Demo

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When LaneGate Helps

• keep agent work as local Markdown tickets
• run each task in its own git worktree
• reduce edit collisions with explicit file-level touches
• block out-of-scope or sensitive-file changes from auto-merge
• run configured safeguards before completion or merge
• pause for human review before anything lands on main

By default, LaneGate commits ticket specs and review verdicts to git as they change. Tickets are a git-native artifact, not local-only state. Executor transcripts, logs, cooldowns, locks, and worktrees stay local under .lanegate/. Set commit_status_changes: false to opt back into fully zero-footprint local state.

MCP is built in. Run lanegate mcp to expose LaneGate commands as native tools for any MCP-compatible agent (Claude, Cursor, etc.), with no shell commands required.

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Concepts in 30 seconds

.lanegate/tickets/TICK-007.md   ← source of truth (YAML frontmatter)
        │
        ▼
lanegate next         ← agent asks: what should I work on?
lanegate start TICK-007  ← agent claims it; worktree + branch created
  ... agent works in .lanegate/worktrees/tick-007/ ...
lanegate complete TICK-007
lanegate review TICK-007
lanegate merge TICK-007   ← branch → main, worktree removed
lanegate promote production  ← staged deploy with guard/pre/post hooks

Main command groups:

Group	Commands
Scoping: record work as tickets and ask an executor to infer touches / close_criteria	create, analyze
Execution: who works on what without colliding	board, next, start, complete, review, merge
Delivery: how merged code reaches environments	promote, pipeline-status, flag

That's the happy path. For the full state machine — every status, what blocks each transition, where a ticket lands when a guard or review fails, and how many review rounds run — see docs/lifecycle.md.

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Security Status

LaneGate is experimental software for coordinating coding agents on a local repo. Before letting it run without review, read this section.

What LaneGate does to limit agent scope:

• Runs each agent in a dedicated git worktree, one per ticket
• Enforces a touches list: files committed outside the declared scope route to needs_review
• Hard-blocks writes to CI/CD configs, dependency manifests (Python, JS/Node, Rust, Go, Java/Gradle, Ruby, PHP, .NET), and credential-shaped files (.env, *.pem, secrets.*)
• Scans ticket text for prompt injection signals before dispatch
• Optionally runs gitleaks, semgrep/bandit, pip-audit, npm-audit, composer-audit, and bundler-audit on agent-produced diffs
• Runs configured safeguards such as tests or scripts before complete and merge

What LaneGate does NOT do:

• MCP is not a sandbox. lanegate mcp exposes ticket lifecycle commands as native tools, and an agent with access to those tools can claim tickets, create branches, and trigger merges. The MCP server authenticates nothing beyond what the MCP client config enforces.
• Host executors inherit host permissions. Agents (Claude Code, aider, Codex, Cursor, Kiro, OpenHands) run as the invoking OS user with full filesystem and network access. By default there is no bwrap, seccomp, or container wrapping. An experimental opt-in worktree sandbox for claude executors exists (sandbox: worktree) but is not yet usable with the linked worktrees LaneGate creates — see docs/executor-capabilities.md.
• The file-based lock is single-machine, single-checkout. Two separate clones on two machines can both claim the same ticket.
• File-level locks are not semantic dependency analysis. Two tickets can touch different files and still break each other through shared APIs, imports, types, schemas, or runtime behavior. Treat touches as a practical coordination boundary, not a proof of correctness.

Recommendation: use --human-review final when running lanegate run on any repository with production code. This stops after implementation and requires lanegate merge <id> to be run manually after you inspect the diff. To make this the safe default without depending on every invocation remembering the flag, set default_human_review: final (or per_ticket) in .lanegate.yml. An explicit --human-review flag still overrides it. Note that a ticket's autonomy field also gates the merge step: the default autonomy: supervised already pauses every approved ticket for a human merge decision regardless of --human-review, and unattended merge only happens when both --human-review none and autonomy: full/green/yellow apply — see docs/config-reference.md for the full breakdown.

For the full threat model, executor permissions, and safe usage notes, see SECURITY.md and docs/security-model.md.

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Known Limitations

• Lock scope is single-machine, single-checkout. The file-based concurrency lock at .lanegate/orchestrator.lock prevents two lanegate run runs on the same checkout from racing, but does not coordinate across separate clones or machines.
• No OS-level sandbox by default. Agents run as child processes with full user permissions (no bwrap, seccomp, or container wrapping), regardless of which Claude Code permission mode is configured (see the next bullet for that separate, application-level choice). LaneGate inspects the git diff after the agent exits. It cannot observe what the agent read or sent over the network during execution. An experimental sandbox: worktree opt-in for claude executors adds a bwrap/Seatbelt filesystem profile, but it is not yet usable with linked worktrees and provides no network or syscall confinement — treat it as in-development.
• Executor permissions come from the executor runtime, not from LaneGate. lanegate init configures Claude Code with a scoped --allowedTools set by default so the agent can run headless without interactive prompts, while tools outside that list stay gated. You can instead configure flags: ["--dangerously-skip-permissions"], which disables Claude Code's per-action approval prompts entirely. That's a valid choice for setups like a sandboxed CI runner, but it means the agent acts on anything without confirmation. See Security Status for the full set of options.

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Platform support

Platform	Status
Linux	Supported, primary development platform
macOS	Supported, CI-verified on every push
Windows	Core functionality works, but projects using .sh executor scripts require WSL

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Install

pip install lanegate
lanegate init    # scaffold .lanegate/ + .lanegate.yml in your repo

lgt and lane are installed alongside lanegate as short aliases for the same command (e.g. lgt board, lane run). Use lanegate run (or lane run) to clear the board; lanegate orchestrate remains a compatibility alias. If you added lane to an existing editable install, run pip install -e . once to create the new executable.

Ticket analysis matches candidate files by parsing real symbols — via stdlib ast for Python and built-in tree-sitter support for JS/TS, Go, Rust, Java, Ruby, C, and C++. Multi-language symbol parsing is available with every LaneGate installation.

LaneGate is a standalone CLI, not a library you import into a project. pipx is the recommended way to install it, since it isolates the tool's own dependencies from whatever Python environment your project uses:

pipx install lanegate
lanegate init

To run from source:

git clone https://github.com/sudheerdvn/lanegate
cd lanegate
pip install -e ".[dev]"

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Quick start

Commit what lanegate init scaffolded (.lanegate.yml, .gitignore, .lanegate/) before creating your first ticket — ticket worktrees are created with git worktree add, which only ever sees committed content, so an uncommitted .gitignore means the first ticket's worktree has none at all:

git add .lanegate.yml .gitignore .lanegate/
git commit -m "chore: scaffold LaneGate"

For real repositories, configure safeguards before you let an executor run. Safeguard commands run in your project's own environment, not LaneGate's, so make sure the test runner is actually installed there first (e.g. pip install pytest in a fresh venv) or pre_complete fails before the executor gets a chance to do anything:

safeguards:
  pre_complete:
    - pytest
  pre_merge:
    - pytest
  post_merge:
    - pytest

# 1. Create a ticket file
cat > .lanegate/tickets/TICK-001.md << 'EOF'
---
id: TICK-001
title: Add rate limiting to the upload endpoint
status: open
priority: 1
touches:
  - src/upload.py
  - src/middleware.py
parallel_safe: true
autonomy: supervised
close_criteria: POST /upload returns 429 after 100 requests/min per user
---

## Background
A single client can saturate the worker pool with rapid uploads.
EOF

# 2. See the board
lanegate board

# 3. Agent claims and works
lanegate start TICK-001
# ... implement in .lanegate/worktrees/tick-001/ ...
lanegate complete TICK-001
lanegate review TICK-001
lanegate merge TICK-001
lanegate validate TICK-001
lanegate done TICK-001

# 4. Deploy
lanegate promote production

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Commands

lanegate board                    # see the ticket board and pipeline snapshot
lanegate next                     # choose the next unblocked ticket(s)
lanegate create "Add rate limits" --title "Rate-limit uploads" --autonomy supervised
lanegate start TICK-007           # claim; creates branch + worktree
lanegate complete TICK-007        # code done → code_complete
lanegate review TICK-007          # submit for review → in_review
lanegate merge TICK-007           # merge to main, delete worktree → merged
lanegate run                      # clear eligible work with the configured executor

That covers daily use. For planning/reporting, the full ticket lifecycle, deployment, feature flags, MCP, the local API/UI, the TUI, monitoring daemons, and setup utilities, see docs/commands.md. lanegate --help-all (or lgt --help-all / lane --help-all) prints the complete flat command list.

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Configuration

.lanegate.yml in your repo root, with walk-up discovery so it works from any subdirectory. Covers the delivery profile (profile: strict — enforced review independence), executor routing (claude, codex, cursor, kiro, aider, openhands, ollama, multi-executor executor_steps, dispatch budget caps), safeguards (pre/post-merge test gates, including the automatic re-verification against the real merged main), UI-ticket visual verification, and deployment environments. The Quick Start above shows a minimal safeguards block to get going.

See docs/config-reference.md for every supported key, defaults, and a full annotated example, and docs/executor-capabilities.md for the capability matrix across executors (local-model setup, headless flags, sandbox status).

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Coordination model

The touches list in each ticket is a pessimistic file-level lock scoped to a single git checkout on a single machine: LaneGate holds the lock from in_progress through in_review, releasing only at merged, which reduces edit collisions when multiple agents work in parallel. It is not semantic dependency analysis — two touch-disjoint tickets can still break each other through a shared API — so treat it as a coordination boundary, not a correctness proof. See docs/architecture.md § Touches Lock Invariants for the full model, including lockfile-pairing guidance per ecosystem and the concurrency bugs fixed versus the original orchestrator.

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Testing

python3 -m pytest tests/ -q

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full test suite breakdown and the release-artifact smoke gate.

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MCP integration

MCP is built in — lanegate mcp starts a stdio server exposing board(), next_ticket(), start(), run(), merge(), and the rest of the lifecycle as native tools for any MCP-compatible agent, no shell commands required. See docs/commands.md § MCP server for client config and the full tool list, and docs/agent-tools.md for supported agent surfaces and continuation guarantees.

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Roadmap

LaneGate's loopback Python API (lanegate api) is built and running today, serving board, ticket, diff, and run state as JSON/SSE. The first local UI is still planned as a small add-on launched with lanegate ui: a bundled TypeScript frontend over that API for board scanning, ticket detail, blocked/review triage, diffs, run logs, and read-only settings preview. The CLI remains the complete fallback for advanced or custom workflows. The UI is not a SaaS service and does not move project state out of your checkout.

V1 has shipped and is on its 1.2 line. Ongoing work centres on coordination honesty (AST-based scope hints, executor conformance tests), broadening executor support, and a real OS-level sandbox (the current sandbox: worktree opt-in is experimental — see Known Limitations). See ROADMAP.md for the current, maintained list — this section intentionally doesn't duplicate it.

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Docs

• docs/commands.md — the full command reference: planning/reporting, the ticket lifecycle, deployment, feature flags, MCP, the local API/UI, the TUI, monitoring daemons, and setup utilities
• docs/lifecycle.md — the ticket state machine: every status, transition gates, failure edges, the auto-fix review loop, and where rebase does and doesn't happen
• docs/demo-walkthrough.md — end-to-end walkthrough: idea → analyze → parallel worktrees → review → merge, using a toy calculator project; includes a dry-run path for users without an executor configured
• docs/troubleshooting.md — FAQ and debug steps: executor hangs, stuck tickets, worktree cleanup, lock files, MCP setup, and more
• SECURITY.md — security policy, reporting vulnerabilities, and what LaneGate does and does not do
• docs/security-model.md — full threat model, trust boundaries, executor permission matrix, MCP trust model, V1 limitations, and safe usage recommendations
• docs/architecture.md — built architecture, module map, and design invariants
• docs/config-reference.md — supported .lanegate.yml keys and defaults
• docs/executor-capabilities.md — capability matrix comparing Claude, Codex, Cursor, Kiro, Aider, OpenHands, and Ollama across headless support, prompt transport, local model support, auto-commit behavior, and sandbox status
• docs/v2-interface-boundaries.md — V1.5 layer boundaries (Python core / local API / UI add-on / optional runner), the lanegate api endpoint contract and what's built vs. still design-only, and the Go TUI spike result
• .lanegate.yml.example — annotated example configuration

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md — dev setup, testing, and the DCO sign-off (git commit -s) required on every commit.