Introduction

Several agents, Orca worktrees, repos and humans share one Mac's simulators, emulators and dev-server ports. Without coordination, two worktrees running e2e at once grab the same sims, an agent taps on your Simulator.app, and a Metro server lands on a port another one already holds.

warden is one global CLI that owns a lease registry. A device or port leased by one owner is never handed to another.

What it does

• Leases live in one sqlite db (~/.warden/warden.db, WAL). Claims run under BEGIN IMMEDIATE, which serialises them across processes — no lockfiles.
• Owners are a Claude/Codex session, CI, or a user shell. The repo and worktree are recorded for messages.
• Liveness: a lease stays alive while its pid is alive or its heartbeat is within the TTL (default 30 min). Stale leases are reclaimed on every claim and by warden gc.
• Devices: warden creates and reuses its own warden-<profile>-N simulators and launches -read-only emulators. It never allocates, shuts down or erases a device it didn't create, unless you pass --adopt.
• Builds: Expo fingerprint → installed → local cache → EAS → local build. All worktrees of a repo share one cache.

30-second tour

warden claim ios --json          # lease a booted, ready sim
warden ls                        # who holds what
warden release --mine --shutdown # done: release + stop sims warden booted