Fan-out

One task splitting into many parallel copies: fifty documents → fifty summarising agents at once. Usually paired with a "fan-in" step that merges the results back together.

Not the same as batch, though both mean "a lot at once." Fan-out is fifty fitters on fifty kitchens this afternoon, because it's urgent. Batch is one van doing fifty drops overnight, cheaper precisely because it can wait.

Why it matters: fan-out is the honest superpower of agent work — things that took a team a week take an afternoon. The catch is quality control at that scale: fifty outputs need a checking strategy, not fifty manual reads.

Related: Batch · Parallel