Files
Claude 2c519cd562 experiment: analysis-only depgraph, to test whether it clears the gate unexempted
NOT a finished change — pushed so the comparison behind a pending decision is
reproducible rather than a claim in a chat log. PR #1409 still carries the viewer.

Question: the viewer's productive output turned out to be the JSON, not the
render. Every finding this session came from numeric queries; the render was never
opened to make a decision. So: does an analysis-only version meet the repo's bar
WITHOUT the Fallow exemption that PR #1409 needs?

Method: delete viewer.{js,css,html} and the geometry (clusterLayout,
layeredLayout), keep computeLevels (it is analysis, not layout), emit JSON plus the
text summary, and REMOVE scripts/depgraph/** from ignorePatterns.

Result, with zero exemptions:

                        with viewer   analysis only
  complexity findings   23 (1 CRIT)   2
  unused files          2             0
  unused exports        3             0
  clone groups          1             0
  lines                 2811          ~590

Identical output: 898 files, 4627 edges, 1338 redundant value edges, 8 non-gated
cycles, R6 42 (matching the gate's baseline). So the numeric part can meet the
repo's bar unexempted; viewer.js — 920 lines with a CRITICAL-complexity `draw` —
never could.

Fixed along the way rather than suppressed: extracted `valueSuccessors` (the
value-edge adjacency was built identically in markRedundantEdges and
computeLevels — a real clone), extracted `edgeKindCode`/`edgeFlags` from a nested
ternary with CRAP 42, un-exported buildPayload/main, and deleted `fileGroup` and
the `group` node field, both dead once the cluster layout went.

Still open if this direction is chosen: split `buildGraph` (81 lines, 20
cyclomatic) and `markRedundantEdges` — the last 2 complexity findings, ordinary
functions rather than a canvas renderer. README is rewritten to match the
report-only shape; the when-to-use guidance carries over unchanged, since it was
already about numeric queries.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Bfu8HofkhybiAm5LECfqur
2026-07-27 08:34:23 +00:00
..

Dependency graph report

pnpm depgraph                       # -> .tmp/depgraph/graph.json + a text summary
pnpm depgraph --out /tmp/graph.json
pnpm depgraph:test

Emits the dependency graph of every production file under src/ (tests excluded) as JSON, plus a short summary of what the layering gate does not enforce. There is no renderer: the productive artifact is the JSON, queried directly.

When to reach for this

It pays for itself on three questions, and misleads on a fourth.

"What am I about to break?" nodes[].in is the dependent count — blast radius. Size the nodes by dependents and the files you should touch carefully are the big ones. Faster than grepping, and it counts type-only and dynamic edges that a grep for from '...' misses.

"Where is the debt actually concentrated?" Zone-level counts (zoneEdges) answer "which boundary carries the most traffic" in one query. The pass that produced ADR-adjacent findings started here.

"What is wrong that the gate does not enforce?" This is the part CI cannot give you. The gate rejects value-import cycles (R4) and spine back-edges (R5); the graph additionally reports:

  • transitively redundant value edges — the target is still reachable from the source at distance >= 2, so the direct import changes nothing about what the module can see. A candidate, not a defect: a direct import is often clearer than a re-export chain. There are ~1300 of these, so treat it as a place to look, never a work list.
  • type-only and dynamic cycles — 8 of them, all outside R4 by design (a type-only import is free at runtime, a dynamic one is a deliberate cold-start seam). Worth reading when a module feels hard to reason about.

Where it misleads: a cluster's size is not its difficulty. This is worth stating plainly because it already cost a day. The commands -> client cluster looked like the obvious win — 28 type-only inversions, all pointing at one file. Moving that file down took the gate from 42 to 48, because the vocabulary it holds depends on commands/, metro/, core/ and remote/; declaring it in contracts/ made the foundation depend on the layers above it. The picture shows you an edge's weight, not whether it can be reversed.

So: use the render to find a candidate, then answer "can this move?" numerically before planning anything. The question is always what does the target itself import, and what rank is that?

pnpm depgraph
# Zone pairs that invert the ranked spine, by type-only edge count. Reproduces the gate's R6
# breakdown from the JSON alone — if these disagree with TYPE_INVERSION_BASELINE, regenerate.
node -e "const j=require('./.tmp/depgraph/index.json');
  const rank=Object.fromEntries(j.zones.map(z=>[z.id,z.rank]));
  j.zoneEdges
    .filter(e=>rank[e.from]!=null && rank[e.to]!=null && rank[e.from]<rank[e.to])
    .map(e=>({pair:e.from+' -> '+e.to, typeOnly:e.count-e.valueCount}))
    .filter(e=>e.typeOnly>0).sort((a,b)=>b.typeOnly-a.typeOnly)
    .forEach(e=>console.log(String(e.typeOnly).padStart(4), e.pair));"

Note zoneEdges[].backEdge flags R5 value back-edges only, and there are none — filtering on it returns an empty list, which is the gate passing, not a broken query.

What is authoritative

pnpm check:layering is. This reads the same model, so the numbers should agree — its R6 count matching TYPE_INVERSION_BASELINE is a useful self-check — but if they ever diverge, the gate is right and the graph is stale. Nothing here runs in CI, and nothing here should gate a merge: it is an instrument, not a rule.

Why it reuses the layering gate

The graph is extracted with scripts/layering/model.ts, the same module scripts/layering/check.ts uses in CI. File set, zone partition, edge kinds (value / type-only / dynamic), and cycle definition are therefore identical to the rules the gate enforces — a separate extractor with its own resolution behaviour would draw a graph nobody is enforcing. Cross-checked once against dependency-cruiser 3.1.1 (at the commit it was written): same modules and edges, plus 88 dynamic/type-only edges dependency-cruiser fails to resolve.

What the JSON carries

  • zones[] — id, spine rank (null when intentionally unranked), classification, file count, LOC.
  • zoneEdges[] — per zone pair: total count, valueCount, and backEdge (R5 value back-edges only — see the note above).
  • nodes[] — per file: zone index, LOC, in/out degree, lvl (longest path to a sink over value edges; R4 guarantees that subgraph is a DAG), and cyc (index into cycles, or -1).
  • edges[] — index-addressed [from, to, kind, flags]. Kind: 0 value, 1 type-only, 2 dynamic. Flags bitfield: 1 spine back-edge, 2 transitively redundant, 4 type-only inversion.
  • cycles[] — each with kind (value / type / dynamic) and its node path.

A "redundant" edge means the target is still reachable from the source at distance >= 2 over value edges, so removing the direct import would not change what the module can see. That makes it a candidate, not a defect: plenty of direct imports are clearer than relying on a re-export chain.