# Epic resolution — explore response noise (CG-24)

Worked 2026-08-05 → 2026-08-06. Started from one bad `codegraph_explore` response
in a real session and ended with four shipped fixes, one open defect, and five
issues closed because measurement contradicted them.

**The headline: the reported symptom was not an explore bug.** It was a degraded
index. The explore defects the investigation found are real and were fixed, but
none of them caused the report.

## The report

A prose flow query returned an unusable response: the symbol the agent had named
never rendered, and a 12k-line generated Cloudflare ambient-types file took 60.7%
of the output envelope.

```
#  deliv%   bytes  reserved  score  pen  flags                file
1    1.0%     251    10,970   87.0  1.00 named entry central  <the named file>
2   60.7%  15,043     6,484   49.0  1.00 entry central        worker-configuration.d.ts
4      —        —         —   19.9  1.00 dropped: budget      <a third file>
```

## Root cause

**Index drift ([CG-33](index-drift-cg33.md)).** The live incrementally-synced index
diverged from a clean rebuild by 4.3% of distinct edges, bidirectionally,
overwhelmingly `calls`. RWR graph mass is relative and normalized, so call edges
missing elsewhere inflate an unaffected file's share — the `.d.ts` carried mass
0.24750 drifted vs 0.13119 rebuilt (~1.9×), score 49.0 vs 27.0.

Two causes, both fixed: incremental sync re-resolved only references *in* changed
files, and `getNodesByName` had no `ORDER BY`, so ties broke by rowid — i.e. by
the order files happened to be **written**. The second is why scope alone could
never converge. Stale edges dropped 671 → 2 across an 80-commit replay.

On a freshly rebuilt index the reported query answers correctly **with no explore
change at all**.

## Shipped

| | what |
|---|---|
| **CG-30** | Bounded how far an oversize cluster member may overshoot; windows on whole lines past 1.5× instead of emitting whole — or, when larger than the response ceiling, dropping the file silently. |
| **CG-31** | Gave the cluster path the `owedBelow` displacement guard the whole-file BUY arm always had, holding back only the prefix of what is owed below that the response can actually pay. |
| **CG-26** | Closed the remaining holes: whole-file arms had no displacement guard at all, section overhead was charged at a flat 200 against a real 300–500, and `owedPayableBelow` held all-or-nothing. |
| **CG-25** | Recognize `Generated by <tool> by running <command>` banners. Precision held by requiring two `by` clauses, so ordinary prose does not match. |
| **CG-28** | Damp declaration-only files that nothing in the index depends on. Does not stack with the generated penalty (`Math.min`), and naming a declaration symbol exempts its file. |
| **CG-33 / CG-35** | Incremental sync converges with a rebuild, plus a regression suite that fails when the fix is disabled. |
| **CG-36** | A later cluster is shrunk into the remainder rather than dropped whole — at selection, and again in the ceiling trim. All 8 starvation flags across the suite clear; +1,012 source chars net. `explore-cluster-starvation-cg36.md`. |

Deterministic across the 6-repo suite: no repo truncates, none loses a file,
okhttp gains one, every repo lands at or under the 25,000 hard ceiling.

## Follow-up — CG-38 (closed)

**Agent-named symbols in the tail of a large file never rendered.** On the
motivating repo, `queueMessage` (line 1087) and `flushQueuedMessages` (1102) in a
1,414-line file were absent from the response on both prose and symbol-bag
queries, even when that file won rank #1 with 67% of the envelope. The response
returned the `QueuedMessage` *interface* at line 70 — a fuzzy near-match on the
query token — instead of the function.

**Pre-existing, not caused by this epic.** A controlled bisect (index held fixed,
engine varied across every merge point) shows the pre-epic engine rendering 12
lines here and CG-36 rendering 463; the symbols render at neither. The epic
strictly improves the case. An earlier claim that the epic regressed it was
wrong — it compared runs across two different indexes.

Two independent causes, both longstanding: `buildFlowFromNamedSymbols` discarded
the named-symbol IDENTITY along with the narrative whenever the named symbols did
not form a call chain, so the importance-9 injection never ran; and the ceiling
trim cut in SOURCE order, so a named def at the end of a large file was always the
first thing dropped. Full account, plus the ranker-penalty lead (real, and
orthogonal — the defs are absent at both `generated` flag states on the old build
and present at both on the new one): `explore-tail-render-cg38.md`.

This epic's probes measure envelope share, starvation, source totals and file
counts. **None measured "did the agent-named symbol render"** — which is why this
survived the whole epic. `scripts/agent-eval/probe-named-symbol.mjs`,
`__tests__/fixtures/tail-render-ts` and
`__tests__/explore-named-symbol-render.test.ts` close that gap: per-symbol and
binary, checking the definition LINE against the response's rendered lines.

CG-36's own measurement is worth carrying forward, because the issue named the wrong
fix point: both real cases (`query.py`, `RealInterceptorChain.kt`) lost on
`maxImportance`, **not** on the density tiebreak the issue suspected. Ranking was
left alone; the never-shrink rule was the lever. Full numbers and the one cost
(okhttp trades its rank-6 file for +7,196 chars in the two that answer the
question) in `explore-cluster-starvation-cg36.md`.

## Closed because measurement contradicted them

Five, which is the story of this epic as much as the fixes are.

| | why |
|---|---|
| **CG-32** | Named file "didn't render first." Drift artifact; on a clean index it renders first and takes 89%. |
| **CG-34** | "Allocator over-reserves for low-scoring files." Filed on a runner's diagnosis without checking the numbers. The file was never over-reserved (4,314 in both arms) — it was over-*spending*, which is CG-31. |
| **CG-27** | Adding `function`/`method` to `ENVELOPE_KINDS` measured as a **large regression** — rank #1 fell from 7,539 delivered chars to 397, 7 of 11 inner closures to 0. The enclosing range was holding the file together as one cluster, inside which `shrinkCluster` already did the per-symbol ranking the issue wanted. A careful version was noise (69 vs 68 across nine queries). |
| **CG-29** | Prose-vs-symbol query gap. Inverted on measurement: prose matches symbol on django and delivers 63% more source on okhttp. The founding observation was drift. |
| **CG-37** | Duplicate of CG-36, filed without seeing it. |

## What this epic is actually a lesson in

**A confident diagnosis is worth less than a cheap measurement.** Every issue
above was filed by someone — human or agent — who had read the code and had a
plausible mechanism. Five were wrong. The ones that survived did so because a
deterministic probe disagreed with them and the probe won.

Two specific traps this cost real time on, both now guarded in tooling:

- **`.codegraph/graph.db` does not exist** — the index is `codegraph.db`, and
  `sqlite3` against a mistyped path *creates* an empty database rather than
  failing. An empty schema reads exactly like a stale pre-migration index. This
  produced a wrong root cause. `diff-index-drift.mjs` refuses a missing path.
- **`ab-new-vs-baseline.sh` checks the engine out at the baseline ref mid-run.**
  A commit made while it runs captures baseline sources and silently reverts the
  fix under test. This happened during CG-30. Check the `changed:` line before
  believing any A/B result.

And one measurement discipline worth keeping: **compare sets, not totals.** The
drift that started all of this shows up as +0.7% on raw edge counts, because it
is bidirectional and nets out. On distinct edge triples it is 4.3%.
