Auto memory file is not safe for concurrent agent teams
Resolved 💬 4 comments Opened Feb 8, 2026 by wkusnierczyk Closed Mar 8, 2026
Problem
The auto memory directory (~/.claude/projects/<project>/memory/MEMORY.md) is a plain file with no concurrency control. The Edit tool does read-match-replace-write with no locking.
With the new agent teams feature, multiple teammates share the same project-scoped memory file. If two agents try to write to it concurrently, the last write wins and the other's changes are silently lost.
Reproduction
- Enable agent teams on a project
- Have two teammates independently discover something worth recording
- Both attempt to
Editthe sameMEMORY.mdat roughly the same time - One agent's update is lost
Expected behavior
Concurrent memory writes should be safe — either via file-level locking, append-only writes, or a merge strategy.
Possible approaches
- File lock (
flockor equivalent) around memory file reads/writes - Append-only log — each agent appends entries; a periodic compaction pass deduplicates
- Per-agent memory files — each teammate writes to its own file (e.g.
memory/<agent-id>.md), with a merged view loaded into the system prompt - CAS (compare-and-swap) — re-read before write, retry if content changed since last read
Context
This also affects background agents launched via Task with run_in_background, which can run concurrently with the main session and other background agents.
This issue has 4 comments on GitHub. Read the full discussion on GitHub ↗