[KK]

But it will not "hide" couchcms tags in template files, since couch templates are pre-processed (parsed) by couch, and this parsing finds and executes couchcms tags even if they are inside html commenting tags. (If this is not completely accurate, someone let me know and I'll correct it.)

It is actually 100% accurate

but in my case I only wanted to copy the site's design (all the template files, snippets, etc.) but none of the page content. My use of the word "clone" was not very precise.

Yes, I gathered that. My thinking was that, once the clone job is done, it might be easier to bulk delete all the pages to leave behind a blank but structurally identical site. Of course, this might become tedious if there are too many cloned pages. In which case, manually setting up the templates would be preferable.

A clone of all content followed by a bulk delete of all pages would have actually been fine in my case. That didn't occur to me, thanks for pointing that out.