Clone Fan-Out Research

Problem

The usual orchestrator-workers pattern assumes specialisation: the orchestrator decomposes the job by role and hands each piece to a worker with a different skill. Many wide-coverage jobs are not role-decomposable at all — every unit needs the same full agent capability, just over a different slice of input. Inventing fake roles wastes the orchestrator's effort and produces inconsistent worker quality. Spawning hundreds of clones without isolation or an aggregation strategy collapses into the unbounded-subagent-spawn anti-pattern.

Solution

A driver computes the input partition (one slice per clone), allocates N isolated sandboxes (e.g. VMs or worktrees) so the clones cannot interfere with one another, and launches N instances of the same agent with the same system prompt and tools — only the input slice differs. Each clone runs to completion independently and writes a structured result to a shared collection bucket. A separate aggregator pass (LLM or deterministic) consolidates results — voting, ranking, deduplication, or synthesis. The clones never communicate; aggregation is one-shot at the end. N is bounded by a declared budget and the available sandbox pool, not by the agent's own discretion.

When to use

• The job naturally partitions into many independent units that each need full agent capability.
• Isolated sandboxes are available so clones cannot interfere.
• An aggregator (vote, rank, dedup, or synthesis) can produce one answer from N structured outputs.