Glossary
Agent lease
Definition
An agent lease is a scoped, time-bounded, audited grant that lets a coding agent hold and work in a project workspace. It defines the task, what the agent may read and write, its resource budget, its environment, and when access expires, so an agent operates with clear limits instead of open-ended access.
Handing a coding agent a workspace raises an obvious question: what exactly is it allowed to do, and for how long? An agent lease is the answer expressed as data. It turns an outcome ('fix the auth callback race in this project') into a bounded run with a defined read scope, a defined write target, a resource budget, an inherited environment, and an expiry.
Because the grant is explicit and recorded, an agent's authority is legible instead of implicit. You can see what it was allowed to touch, where its output is meant to land, and when its access ends. A lease is also the natural place to choose isolation: write directly to the real project, or route output into a review-first overlay for risky work.
Why it matters
Open-ended access to source and secrets is hard to reason about and harder to audit. A lease makes the boundary concrete, so trusting an agent with a real project is a decision with visible limits rather than a leap of faith, and expiry means access does not linger after the task is done.
In practice
You lease an agent read access to ~/Code/acme, write access to the web package, a resource budget, the project's env with secret values withheld from prompts, and a two-hour expiry. Anything outside that scope is not available to the run.
How Bowline relates
In Bowline, a lease is how a trusted agent holds a workspace: it scopes the task, read and write targets, budget, env, and expiry, and records the run. The default write target is the real project directory; an isolated overlay with review and accept is the explicit mode for risky work.
Your ~/Code, on every machine and every agent.
Install bowline and your projects follow you. It just works.
curl -fsSL https://install.bowline.sh | shmacOS app · Linux CLI. Then run bowline login.