Shadow Workspace

Problem

An agent that writes straight to the working tree gives the human no safe boundary: a wrong edit overwrites real work, a multi-step change is hard to review as a whole, and undoing one step without losing the others is fiddly. The agent needs room to make and unmake edits freely, while the human keeps a reviewable, revertible record and the real tree stays clean until changes are accepted.

Solution

Mirror the working tree into a shadow the agent edits instead of the real files — commonly a per-task hidden git repository that checkpoints every edit, or an in-memory overlay that tracks modifications without writing to disk. Each agent edit becomes a diff the human can inspect, and any step can be rolled back to a prior checkpoint without disturbing the others. When the change is accepted it is promoted to the real working tree; if rejected, the shadow is discarded and the real tree is untouched.

When to use

• An agent edits a real workspace and a wrong edit must never corrupt the developer's files.
• Per-edit diffs and independent rollback are needed for review and recovery.
• The shadow can be kept close enough to the real tree that promotion stays clean.