Explore's per-file relevance awarded +50/+10/+3/+1 by match class and admitted
anything scoring >= 3. Neither half held up: the tier said HOW a symbol reached
us, never whether the match was evidence, and an absolute floor admits noise on
any repo where the top file scores 50+. Three scripts/agent-eval/*.mjs harnesses
took 63% of this repo's own "how does explore allocate its output budget" answer
on nothing but an unused `const explore` and a `const BUDGET`.
Four levers:
- KIND WEIGHT (RELEVANCE_KIND_WEIGHT): callables and types 1.0, members ~0.5,
variable/constant/parameter 0.15-0.35. A weak-kind symbol with no usage edge
anywhere in the graph (`contains` excluded — nesting is not usage) drops to
0.08. Only weak kinds in the top two tiers pay for the DB probe; the subgraph's
own edges answer most cases free. No measurable latency change (210 vs 211
ms/call, n=12 interleaved).
- PERIPHERAL CAP: nodes >=2 hops from any match accumulate into a bucket capped
at 5. Uncapped they added a flat +1 each, so a file grew more relevant by being
bigger — parse-session.mjs reached 22 off one constant plus twelve unrelated
symbols.
- RANK PENALTY: generated files x0.3, low-value x0.5, applied to the score AND
the graph mass. Score alone would not have fixed#1500 — the generated CRUD
carries MORE graph mass than the hand-written use-case, and graph mass outranks
score in the comparator. Self-normalizing, never a hard exclusion.
- RELATIVE FLOOR: clamp(topScore * 0.2, 1, 10). Capped at one full-strength
direct match so concentration elsewhere can never exclude one (without it a
named-seed-heavy file pushed the floor to 21 and dropped a file the agent had
named by class name). Backfills to 3 candidates when it would leave fewer, and
drops the evidence requirement rather than return nothing at all.
excludeLowValueFiles was dead config — declared per tier, read nowhere; the
test/spec exclusion has been unconditional for a while. Removed. The real gap was
the detector: `isLowValue` anchored on a leading `/`, so a repo-ROOT `test/` dir
(express, cobra, most of npm and Go) never matched — express's routing question
spent 59% of its envelope on three test files. Anchored at `^` too, and the
filter now runs before the floor and judges "are there other candidates?" on the
whole gather.
Measured before/after on the same indexes (baseline bd86ad2):
- payroll-go fixture: generated 57.4% -> 23.5%; answer 25.6% -> 61.5%; cycle.go
delivered 0 -> 38.9%. Generated ranks #3/#4, was #1/#2.
- self-query fixture: eval scripts 72% -> 0%; tools.ts ranks #1.
- express "route a request": 59% to test/* -> lib/application.js + lib/response.js
- cobra x3, codegraph "indexing pipeline": byte-identical (control)
Diagnostic gains a per-file penalty multiplier and NodeKind mix, so "why did this
file score X" is legible. Selection stages reordered to match the pipeline.
CG-6's gates flip from it.fails to live regressions except the byte-split ones,
which stay open for CG-12 (allocation still follows file size within the ranked
set).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
