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date: 2026-06-11 tags: [orchestration, fan-out, agents, ideate, merge] status: active graduated_to:
Merge fan-out output mechanically; keep judgement a separate, blind step
Pattern — when you fan out work to N workers/helpers and bring their outputs back, split the reduce into two stages that must not blur:
- Merge — mechanical, hands-off. Flatten/concatenate into one pool, strip attribution (so downstream stays blind), dedupe only verbatim repeats. Prefer plain code over a model call. The merging agent authors and edits nothing.
- Judgement — separate and blind. Ranking, scoring, selecting, semantic dedup happen after, in a distinct pass run blind (a
chooseragainst a rubric, ablind-revieweragainst the standards).
Why — a model told to "merge these" silently drops, conflates, re-words and pre-ranks, biasing the pool before judgement even runs. Mechanical merge is cheaper, faster, reproducible, and preserves the full option space so the later judgement is honest. (Surfaced both ways this session: ideate already did this right — "Merge flat, mechanically" — and the orchestration research independently converged on "reduce in plain code, not a model call.")
Tell — if your merge step is making a quality call (deciding what's better, not just what's duplicate), you've crossed the line — move that call into the judgement step.
Where it lives — docs/agents/deterministic-merge.md is the one home; ideate and docs/agents/orchestration.md point at it.