Collision Ladder

Collision Ladder

The concrete engine for collision-ladder — the Op2 second-bullet of the cyberfleet-batch self-hosting-kernel (issue #189). The shared work list (mission-graph) holds two Missions apart whenever they touch the same work area (a node collision), conservatively serializing any same-area overlap. Most such overlaps are false — the area holds many files and the Missions usually touch different ones, or the same file in different spots. This engine is the disambiguator: given a known node collision between two Missions, it descends a ladder of finer grains — file → region → semantic — and stops at the first grain that tells a hard clash (must serialize) from a soft one (can run in parallel, reconciled by rebase).

It runs rarely, only on the colliding pair, only to justify downgrading a suspected false-hard — never as the baseline signal, never to find a collision (that is the work list's job).

The ladder (descend only until classifiable, then stop):

• file — the two Missions' changed files under the node are disjoint ⇒ soft (artifact-neutral, highest confidence). The common case.
• region — for each shared file, both sides' touched line-hunks are known and disjoint ⇒ soft (textual). Overlapping — or either side's hunks unknown — descends.
• semantic, split by artifact-type (keyed structurally off the path):
  • .feature (behavioral prose) → the scenario: different scenarios ⇒ soft, the same scenario ⇒ hard (freeze-anchored, the same gherkin-cli diff the sibling reuses).
  • code → the symbol — the ★ deferred capstone (issue #189's third bullet): stays hard, flagged symbol-rung-deferred.
  • non-behavioral prose (governance / reference, no suite) → no finer anchor; stay hard, reason no-anchor.

The node rollup is hard if any shared file is hard, else soft; it records the decisive rung and a confidence that decays down the ladder (a file-rung soft outranks a semantic-rung soft).

The shared-thin-file downgrade. A file touched by many Missions (a CLI router, barrel, registry) is the case the work list most over-serializes. The ladder's descent is the downgrade — a shared-thin file changed in disjoint regions (or different scenarios) downgrades hard→soft instead of serializing. A file whose touching-mission degree reaches a threshold (default 3) is flagged sharedThin and surfaced as an architectural smell to consider splitting (surfacing only — it never performs the split).

It composes the sibling touch-set-correction's collectChangedFiles (which itself composes resolve-governances for artifact-type and the pinned gherkin-cli@0.0.2 diff for changed scenarios — never a reimplemented differ) and adds one finer source, git diff -U0 line-hunks (the region rung).

Pure derivations (classify, classifyFile, hunksDisjoint, isFeature, isCode, confidenceRank, the render helper) take and return plain data — no fs/network access — kept apart from a thin IO seam (readFileHunks, collectMissionTouch) that shells out to git diff -U0 and reuses the correction engine's composition.

Run it

# constructed input (a ClassifyInput JSON) — the primary, tested path:
node "<skill>/scripts/collision-ladder.mts" --input <file|-> [--format toon|json]

# sourced from two mission git ranges for one colliding node:
node "<skill>/scripts/collision-ladder.mts" --from-git --node <project/capability> \
  --x <base..head> --y <base..head> [--root .] \
  [--layout 'sdd:.agents/specs/sdd,plugins/sdd/skills']... \
  [--shared-thin-threshold 3] [--format toon|json]

• A ClassifyInput is { node, x, y, degrees?, sharedThinThreshold? }, where x/y are each a MissionTouch ({ mission, files }) and every file is { path, artifactType, hunks, changedScenarios } (hunks: null means the line-hunks were not recorded — the region rung will not clear it).
• Default output is TOON; --format json emits the full LadderVerdict: node, the hard-or-soft collision, the decisive rung, the confidence, the per-shared-file sharedFiles, the shared-thin smells, and the deferrals (files whose downgrade awaits the ★ symbol rung).

Boundaries

Read-only w.r.t. the mission graph — it never writes to it and never schedules; it returns a verdict the scheduler consumes. It does not detect a collision (the mission-graph WAW-mutex does — this runs only after one is found), do ★ SSA lowering or infer symbol-level produce/consume dependencies (issue #189's capstone — an overlapping-region code file stays hard, flagged symbol-rung-deferred), descend past the scenario grain, or decide whether to split a shared-thin file (it surfaces the smell; the architect decides). It classifies; it does not schedule.