TeamContext: a traffic light for AI coding agents

The problem. Teams no longer write code alone: each developer drives their own AI agent. The agents are fast, but blind to each other. Ask your agent to add a search box to the header while a teammate's agent adds a dark-mode toggle to the same header, and neither agent knows. Both edit src/header.js, both push, and the team finds out at merge time: a conflict, rework, and a conversation to reconstruct what the other agent changed. The faster the agents get, the more often this happens. The solution. TeamContext is a coordination layer — a traffic light — for AI-assisted teams. Before an agent edits a file, it asks for a lock. If a teammate's agent already holds it, the agent stops and tells its developer who is working on the file and since when, instead of creating a conflict. It has four parts: 1. A custom IBM Bob mode, "🚦 TeamContext". Its rules make Bob call the coordination tools on its own: check team status at the start of a task, lock each file before editing it, unlock it with a one-line summary of what changed, and leave a handoff note when the task ends. The developer just asks for the feature; they never mention locks. 2. An MCP server, published on npm as teamcontext-mcp. It exposes four tools (team_status, file_lock, file_unlock, release_all), detects the repository from git and normalizes paths so every teammate refers to the same file. It never crashes the agent: if the server is unreachable, it says so. 3. A central server on Vercel with Supabase Postgres. Lock acquisition is a single atomic Postgres function, so two requests can never be granted the same file. Locks expire automatically after a TTL, so a crashed session never blocks the team. 4. A live dashboard showing who is editing which file, conflicts avoided, and a feed of handoff notes written by the agents. Target users. Small and medium teams where several developers use AI coding agents on the same repository — especially during fast iterations such as hackathons, feature sprints and pair work across time zones. How they use it. One npx line in Bob's MCP configuration and the custom mode in the project's .bob/ folder. From then on, developers work exactly as before; Bob coordinates for them. Impact. In our before/after demo, the same two tasks on the same file produced a merge conflict without TeamContext. With TeamContext, the second agent stopped at the lock, retried after the first finished, and edited the updated file: zero merge conflicts, and the handoff note told the second developer exactly what changed. Why it is new. Existing tools resolve conflicts after they happen (merge tools) or rely on humans announcing what they are working on (chat, tickets). TeamContext moves coordination to the moment of editing and gives it to the agents themselves, so it scales with how fast AI agents now write code.