TechnologyAugust 8, 2026

forking

FORK-ing

Definition

The act of creating a copy of a software project or execution state from a specific point in time, allowing it to diverge into a separate branch or path.

Etymology

Derived from the Middle English 'forke' and the Old English 'forca,' originally referring to a two-pronged tool. In computer science, the term was adopted in the 1980s to describe a process creating a copy of itself to run concurrently.

In the news

In the context of Shepherd, forking allows users to capture a specific state of an AI agent's execution and create a new instance from that point. This enables developers to experiment with alternative outcomes without affecting the original run.

Meet Shepherd: An Open-Source Python Substrate That Lets Meta-Agents Fork, Replay, and Revert Any Agent Run

Read the full article ↗

MarkTechPost

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