Definition
Plain language
Either a copy of a codebase kept as its own project, or a running program splitting itself into two.
As stated in the literature
In version control, an independent clone of a repository maintained separately from upstream; in operating systems, the fork() syscall, which creates a child process duplicating the parent's address space.
Also called: fork(), forked, forks
Why it matters: It's the foundation of cheap parallel sandboxes, which is how RL pipelines and snapshotting systems achieve fast fan-out without duplicating gigabytes.
For example, a parent process can fork into a thousand children almost instantly because they all share the same memory pages until one tries to write.
Heard on the show
“" Every time the code hits a branch — `if x is greater than ten` — the engine forks.”Episode 014 — Why a Constrained Pipeline Beat a Full Coding Agent at Finding Bugs 30-to-1