A later explore call re-served whatever it re-ranked, so on the #1500 report
the 4th call spent its envelope on the spine the 1st call had already
delivered. CG-17 recorded what was served; this acts on it.
What a withheld span becomes is the whole design: a POINTER, never a silence.
An insufficient-feeling response is what sends an agent to Read, and one or
two of those early in a session teach it to abandon codegraph — so the
replacement names the file, the symbols and the line spans, and says both
that the source came from THIS conversation and that the file has not changed
since.
- Content fingerprint, not the drift flag, gates it. They answer different
questions: two calls inside one drift window served the same current bytes,
while a file edited AND re-synced between calls is never "stale" and yet
the agent's copy is now wrong. An edited file re-emits in full.
- Only a covered run of >= 8 lines is replaced, and a remainder under 160
chars folds into the pointer. Below those the pointer costs more than the
source and the block reads as shredded — a fence holding `228\t` is a
broken-looking response, which is the expensive failure.
- The reclaimed bytes go to files the agent has NOT seen, two ways: a smaller
`sourceSpent` hands slack down CG-21's carry-forward pool, and a fully
back-referenced file gives up its maxFiles slot the way a cliffed one does.
Within a file, the cluster shrink now reads the DEDUPED length, so it never
drops new symbols to make room for source it isn't sending.
- If dedup suppresses everything and nothing new takes its place, the top
suppressed file is spliced back in whole. An all-pointer response is the
shape that reads as "codegraph found nothing"; one re-served file is the
cheaper mistake.
Kill switch: CODEGRAPH_EXPLORE_DEDUP=0.
Colby McHenry
ab38d1f090