I organize in folders like everyone else here, but I'm stuck on something. What I'm really trying to get to is being able to have one agent working on one task/department while another agent works on a completely different task/department at the same time — without either one pulling in the other's context, and without burning through tokens re-explaining or re-loading things that aren't relevant to what it's actually doing. I'm about to add a landing page, Terms/Privacy, and marketing on top of an existing app, and I want to know whether to give each its own folder or fold them into the app's existing one.
My app is set up with its own folder, its own running notes, one thing actively being worked on at a time.
I now need to add work that isn't the app itself: a landing page, Terms/Privacy, and marketing copy. Different content, different audience, different pace of change than the app — and importantly, nobody's touching the same files for these at the same time. That's exactly the situation where I'd want to point a separate agent at each one in parallel — one working on the landing page, another drafting the Terms of Service, another on the app itself (keeping their own feedback loops) — without any of them needing to load or wade through the others' notes and files just to get started. My instinct is that this argues for giving each one its own folder, all sitting side by side, rather than cramming all of it into the app's existing folder and juggling several things "in progress" there at once, where one agent's context ends up mixed in with another's.
Two things I'd like input on:
1. Shared facts. A few things are true everywhere — the product's name, a one-line description, what it does, who it's for, pricing, what data it collects. My plan is to write those down once, in a shared folder that each department can read, and have the isolated department folders point back to that shared context if there's something worth sharing across functions. When one folder finishes something the others need (like the legal folder finishing the Terms of Service, which the landing page then needs to link to), it gets handed over once as a finished document, not kept magically in sync. Does that "write once, hand off when done" approach hold up in practice, or does it fall apart over time?
2. Fitting it in physically. My app already keeps its own running notes next to its code, in a small generic pattern — one file with confirmed facts, one file with whatever's actively being worked on, a place to park ideas:
Current:
my-app/
├── src/... ← the actual app code
└── context/ ← the app's own working notes
├── overview.md ← what this project is
├── plan.md ← confirmed facts + what's been decided
├── active-task.md ← the one thing being worked on right now
├── product-facts.md ← name, one-liner, audience, pricing, data collected
└── ideas/ ← parked, not-yet-started ideas
Option A — everything stays inside the app folder. Landing page, legal, and marketing become subfolders bolted onto the app, sharing its one active-task.md — which means one agent's task context ends up sitting right next to another's, whether or not either one needs it:
my-app/
├── src/...
├── context/
│ ├── overview.md
│ ├── plan.md
│ ├── active-task.md ← now has to stand for FOUR unrelated things:
│ │ an app bugfix, landing page copy, a ToS draft,
│ │ and marketing assets, all at once
│ ├── product-facts.md
│ └── ideas/
├── landing-page-src/ ← unrelated content, bolted on
├── legal-drafts/ ← unrelated content, bolted on
└── marketing-assets/ ← unrelated content, bolted on
Option B — each gets its own sibling folder, all sitting under one plain outer folder that isn't itself "special" in any way — so an agent working in legal/ never even sees marketing/ or landing-page/ unless it goes looking:
my-stuff/ ← just a plain folder, nothing special about it
├── shared/ ← facts that matter across every department
│ └── product-facts.md ← name, one-liner, audience, pricing, data collected
├── app/ ← the existing app, moved in as-is, unchanged internally
│ ├── src/...
│ └── context/
│ ├── overview.md
│ ├── plan.md
│ ├── active-task.md ← only ever about the app
│ └── ideas/
├── landing-page/ ← new, own code + own notes, set up fresh
│ ├── src/...
│ └── context/
│ ├── overview.md
│ ├── plan.md
│ └── active-task.md ← only ever about the landing page
├── legal/
│ ├── drafts/...
│ └── context/
│ ├── overview.md
│ ├── plan.md
│ └── active-task.md ← only ever about Terms/Privacy
└── marketing/
├── assets/...
└── context/
├── overview.md
├── plan.md
└── active-task.md ← only ever about marketing
(landing-page/, legal/, and marketing/ each just point back at shared/product-facts.md when something is worth sharing across functions, instead of copying it in.)
Has anyone dealt with retrofitting sibling folders onto a project that started out as Option A — did moving the existing project inside a new parent folder like this cause any pain, or is there a cleaner way to get to Option B, or other options I'm not thinking of?
More generally: if you've split off the non-core parts of a project (marketing, legal, a landing page) into their own separate space so you could work on them in parallel without agents stepping on each other's context — did that hold up as things grew, or did you regret the split (or regret not doing it sooner)? Any gotchas before I commit to this?