12. Search

chapters_search answers over the mirror — so it behaves identically offline, on git, or on TreeDX, and its inputs are plain files you can grep.

What’s indexed

Search reads every chapter and rule file in the mirror, frontmatter first. The two-layer index around it:

Layer 1 — curation facts. Per-machine, append-only JSONL at edits/<harnessId>/curation.jsonl: topic aliases, pins, weights, groups, notes — and this machine’s rule-approval facts. One writer per file, ever; zero conflicts by construction.

Layer 2 — the derived index. One shard per canonical topic (index/<topic>.md, alphabetical) plus a build manifest, rebuilt deterministically from the corpus at every sync. Incremental when nothing changed; a full rebuild from primaries is the recovery path — which is why divergence is recovery, not corruption.

Stitching. Legacy compaction fragments (pressure-sliced chapters titled “Earlier history” / “Conversation span”) that sit adjacent within a session cohere into ONE search entry citing every member — nothing merged on disk, no chapter rewritten.

What ranks

• Lexical score, deterministic and inspectable: topic hits ×2, title and summary ×1 each — a rule’s body scores as its summary, and a category match adds 1.5. Recency only breaks ties (a fresh file that matched no term never ranks). Results pack to a token budget (searchDefaultMaxTokens, default 400) — the shape of the answer is bounded, the corpus is not, and total vs shown says when to raise the budget;
• topic-awareness — emergent vocabulary from the enrichment ladder (§14) aliases surface forms; candidates are applied only if vocabApply is on, so the default posture is shadow, review, then enable;
• per-machine rule bonus (rulesCoreBonus, default 0.15) — rules you approved on this machine rank their categories higher; teammates get their own ranking from their own approvals.

Why the receipts in the answer

Each hit cites chapters/<key>/…md — a path to verbatim text, not a paragraph to trust. That closes the loop back to the archive: search is the address book, read is the retrieval, and the guarantee stays “every byte remains retrievable.” The field study watched agents follow chapter paths with read 49/49 times.

Continue: Rules & governance.