The map query language — А5b

1. What was measured at design time

04Every reading in this section is dated 2026-08-06 and was taken BEFORE any code was written, over the committed specmap.json (schema 3) — the standing law that a plan is measured against the authored tree before it is built. They are kept as they were taken; a later re-measurement goes beside them rather than over them.

05The graph is bipartite, directed code→spec, and small. 5 825 spec units, 1 006 code items, 955 edges, all of provenance authored; 0 suspects, 208 warnings. Every edge's from_symbol resolves to a code item (955 of 955); 934 of 955 resolve to a spec unit at the far end.

06Three of the five edge verbs exist in this tree: implements 716, verifies 225, deviates 14. documents and informs are zero. A lacks:documents query would therefore return every unit in the corpus — true, and useless. The grammar accepts them anyway, because the vocabulary is the schema's and a filter that silently rejects a legal verb is worse than one that answers «all of them».

07The canonical question's raw answer is 5 742 rows against a ceiling of 200. 98.6 % of spec units carry no incoming verifies edge; 95.5 % carry no edge of any kind. The negative predicate on its own is not a usable query — it is a statement that the corpus is mostly unverified, which was already known.

08The existing filters cannot narrow it, and this is the design's load-bearing finding. kind is carried by 0 of 5 825 spec units — every unit in this tree is legacy-unmarked, exactly as ##MAP-QUERY-THE-KIND-VOCABULARY-IS-MEASURED-NOT-INVENTED already records — and status and revision are likewise 0. The uri filter is an exact match, so it names precisely one unit. Composing the negative predicate with what exists therefore narrows 5 742 to either 5 742 or 1, and neither is the question anyone asks.

09A document scope is what turns the question into an answer, and the numbers say by how much. The map spans 72 distinct documents; units per document run 358 at the largest, 57 at the median, 10 at the smallest. Scoping the canonical query to one document brings 67 of the 72 inside the 200 ceiling. The five that still truncate are named rather than hidden: PROP-005 (349 of 358 lack verifies), PROP-003 (308), PROP-002 (279), PROP-019 (234), PROP-000 (204).

10Depth is not vacuous, and the first reading of it was wrong. Sampling the three highest-degree nodes showed depth 2 reaching exactly what depth 1 reached, which would have made a depth dimension a feature with no subject. Measured exhaustively over all 1 205 edge-bearing nodes instead: 864 of them — 71.7 % — reach strictly more at depth 2 than at depth 1, 71 reach more at depth 3, and component diameters run to 8 hops. The three sampled nodes were star centres whose leaves happen to carry one edge each; a sample of the most connected nodes is not the graph.

11The traversal cannot explode, measured rather than hoped. The edge-bearing subgraph falls into 255 connected components, the largest holding 44 nodes and the next four 25, 23, 22, 21. An unbounded walk from any seed is therefore bounded by 44 — comfortably under the ceiling — so depth is a precision control here, not a safety one. The ceiling stays hard regardless: it protects against a future map, not against this one.

1221 edges point at a URI that names no unit in the map, over five distinct targets — and four of the five are correct. ENGINE-CONFORM-v0.1#rules (11 edges), PROP-014#queries (6), PROP-014#index (1) and the fully-qualified …/core-ai-native/mechanisms/PROP-014#addressing-code (1) all address installed packages, which are deliberately outside the project map so its byte-reproducibility holds. The fifth is not: see ##m-one-dangling-edge-is-a-host-defect.

13The fifth dangling target is the host citing an anchor of its own that has never existed. Two specmark::scope! declarations — crates/vibe-cli/src/commands/tools.rs:13 and crates/vibe-workspace/src/tools.rs:16 — address spec://org.vibevm.core/vibevm/modules/vibe-workspace/PROP-025#binaries, and PROP-025 carries no such anchor (build, cross-package, dispatch, gc, history, manifest, problem, root, security, staleness, v1-cut). This is the recorded «vibe tools shipped with no spec document» finding wearing its other face, and no gate reports it. Filed separately; this document only records that the measurement surfaced it.

2. The grammar

14A query is a conjunction of predicates and nothing else. No OR, no parentheses, no precedence, no grouping. Every one of those is a permanent versioning liability, and the measured questions need none of them: the corpus's real queries are «inside this document, units lacking this edge» and «what does this reach». A grammar whose whole syntax is «predicates separated by whitespace» can be extended by adding a predicate without ever renumbering the language.

15Seven predicates, and the first three are the filter level reached from above rather than reimplemented:

query      := predicate ( WS predicate )*
predicate  := "uri:"    <exact spec:// address>
            | "symbol:" <substring of a code symbol>
            | "kind:"   <item_kind or spec-unit kind>
            | "scope:"  <spec:// address prefix>
            | "has:"    <implements|verifies|documents|deviates|informs>
            | "lacks:"  <implements|verifies|documents|deviates|informs>
            | "depth:"  <0..3>

17scope: is in the set because ##m-scope-is-what-makes-it-answerable measured that without it the level's own canonical question is unanswerable. It is a prefix match over the unit's URI, which is the one axis this corpus actually carries — 72 documents, median 57 units. It applies to spec units only, exactly as uri: does.

18has: and lacks: select seeds; they do not filter the traversal's result. A node passes lacks:verifies when no edge of that verb touches it — incoming for a spec unit, outgoing for a code item, which is the only reading that makes one predicate serve both families of a directed bipartite graph. Applying them after expansion would answer a different question nobody asked, and would make depth:0 differ from no depth at all.

19depth:N expands the seed set along edges, undirected, N hops, and the seeds stay in the answer. depth:0 is the identity and is the default, so a query without depth: is exactly the seed selection — which is what keeps this level a strict superset of the one below rather than a different thing wearing its name. The upper bound is 3, chosen against ##m-the-blast-radius-is-bounded: an unbounded walk on this map reaches at most 44 nodes, and 5.9 % of nodes gain anything at all past depth 2, so depth 3 already exceeds what the corpus can use.

20A traversal hit carries the hop count it was reached at, and a seed carries 0. Without it the caller cannot tell what it asked for from what the walk dragged in, and an agent reading a 40-row answer has no way to rank it.

21An unknown predicate, an unknown verb, or a malformed value is a parse ERROR that names the offending token and lists what was expected — never a silently ignored clause. This is the same law ##B068-UNKNOWN-TYPE-IS-AN-ERROR states for the markup's typed fences, for the same reason: a grammar that ignores what it does not understand promises everything and checks nothing, and the promise is discovered by whoever trusted it.

22The grammar carries a version, and it is reported in every answer rather than demanded in every query. A query string stays free of ceremony; the structured answer states the grammar version it was parsed under, so a consumer that cares can branch and one that does not is unaffected. Demanding a version prefix in the query would put the cost of versioning on every caller forever to buy nothing until the first breaking change.

23An empty query is refused, not treated as «everything». The filter level already answers «a bounded slice of the whole map» for a bare call, and it is one function call away; a second spelling of it here would be a second implementation of the same answer.

3. What this level does NOT get

24No disjunction and no free negation. lacks: is the only negative form, and it is a predicate rather than an operator precisely so that the grammar has no operator layer to version. A caller wanting a union runs two queries; a caller wanting arbitrary negation is asking for a different tool.

25Results stay nodes, never edges — ##MAP-QUERY-RESULTS-ARE-NODES already rules this and traversal does not reopen it. «Find me an edge» remains a question nobody asks; the hop count is how an edge shows up in an answer.

26The code-quality engine's findings do not join here. The owner's ruling that two engines must not merge their data, and that any join happens at query time over file/line, is recorded at ##B019-V-RECOMMENDATION and remains unbuilt. This level adds no new obstacle to it — the hit shape already carries a discriminated source field — and it builds none of it.

27Nothing is cached or persisted. The map is built fresh per call exactly as the filter level and explain build it, for the reason ##MAP-QUERY-BUILT-FRESH-LIKE-EXPLAIN gives: a query answers for the tree as it is. Traversal changes the cost of a call, not its freshness contract.

4. The cut

28Slice 1 — the level, whole. The parser, the seed predicates, scope:, has:/lacks:, depth:, the hop count, both renderings, and the two surfaces. It is one slice because the parser without the predicates answers nothing and the predicates without the parser are the level below.

29Slice 2 — the contract moves into the specification. PROP-015 gains the level's section beside #map-query, and this document keeps only the reasoning. Per the standing law, the facts that move are judged in the same pass that moves them.

30The dangling-edge gate is NOT part of this work, though the measurement that designed this level is what found the host's broken address. A query that can ask the question is not a gate that answers it every commit, and conflating them would make this slice unfinishable.

5. Rejected

31Rejected: expressing the level as CLI flags and MCP fields, with no parser at all. It is genuinely cheaper and it is what the deferral note recommended for the level below — but the owner ruled a query LANGUAGE, the versioning cost was accepted in advance (##design-the-price-was-named-in-advance), and a flag set cannot grow a predicate without growing both surfaces. The grammar is one string both surfaces pass through unread.

32Rejected: folding the filters into the grammar so there is one level. The owner's ruling forbids it in as many words — the filter level is permanent and separately reachable so that a broken grammar cannot take it down. This is also why the parser lives in its own module with its own entry point rather than inside the search function.

33Rejected: unbounded traversal, or a depth the caller may raise freely. The measured component ceiling is 44 today, which makes an unbounded walk look safe — on this map, this week. A bound that is safe only because the data is currently small is not a bound, and the ceiling exists for the same reason.

34Rejected: returning edges when a traversal predicate is present. It would make the result type depend on the query, so every consumer would carry two readers and the renderers would fork. The hop count carries what an edge would have carried, at no cost to the shape.