RKC Spine Expansion: Free Hops

RKC Spine Expansion: Free Hops A workflow diagram generated by Archify. 01 / Structural walk 02 / Spine expansion 03 / Pack Budgeted Free expansion Emit Pack root · Subject root · Structural walk › Budgeted Pack root Subject root Structural hop 1 · spends budget · Structural walk › Budgeted Structural hop 1 spends budget Structural hop 2 · budget spent · Structural walk › Budgeted Structural hop 2 budget spent Frontier · no third hop · Structural walk › Free expansion · max_hops = 2 Frontier no third hop max_hops = 2 Finding · in budget · Spine expansion › Budgeted Finding in budget Claim · asserts · Spine expansion › Free expansion · no hop cost Claim asserts no hop cost Evidence · evidenced_by · Spine expansion › Free expansion · no hop cost Evidence evidenced_by no hop cost ContextPack · full chain · Pack › Emit ContextPack full chain asserts assembled evidenced_by budget exhausted Finding reached second hop walk out Legend User UI Agent logic Policy Context / trace External system

Two budgets, not one

  • • max_hops applies to the structural walk only
  • • asserts and evidenced_by expansion is free once a Finding is in

Why the spine is free

  • • A Claim without its Evidence is an unsupported assertion
  • • Splitting them across a hop boundary would ship half an argument

RKC has its own ladder

  • • ripgrep first, then the pack command
  • • BM25 and Chroma next when lexical search is not enough