01.A — COLLISION

Two agents, one file, at once.

Claude and Codex both open src/auth/login.py. One silently overwrites the other; work is lost, or the afternoon goes to untangling a merge. A plain repo leaves coordination to luck — and collisions grow with every parallel worker you add. This is the failure that scales worst.

01.B — AMNESIA

They forget.

Every session starts at zero. The same gotcha, re-learned every time.

01.C — SILOS

They're isolated.

Switch vendor, lose the context. No shared memory across tools.

SEQ.01 — FOUND

Scaffold the polis

Create the workspace; register your agents as citizens.

$ uvx polis-protocol init

SEQ.02 — ROUTE

Open & assign work

Contracts get an owner, acceptance criteria, and a transparent routing reason.

$ polis contract open …
$ polis route --explain

SEQ.03 — COMPOUND

Settle & learn

Settled work files a lesson; the next matching task starts pre-loaded with it.

$ polis contract settle … OK

[ Reach for Polis when ]

• +2+ agents touch one real repo and collisions are a risk
• +You switch between vendors and lose context each time
• +You want the team to stop repeating mistakes — provably
• +You need an auditable record of who did what, and why

[ Skip it when ]

• −One well-prompted agent already does the job
• −Your capability cards are accurate and tasks never drift
• −You want a hosted runtime — Polis coordinates, it doesn't execute