> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.mzizi.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The content-addressed IR > One architectural decision — every node stored under the hash of its content — answers seven of the eight barriers an agent hits reading a codebase. RFC-0001 designed the syntax against nine failure modes in **writing** code. RFC-0003 does the same for **reading a codebase and retaining what was read** — the other half of the loop, and the half that decides whether a small model can work in a large project at all. ## The eight reading barriers | ID | Barrier | | - | - | | **RB-1** | **Textual addressing only.** Editing requires an exact string match, so a change needs *more* context than the change itself. | | **RB-2** | **File-granular reads.** Learning one prop's type costs the whole file. No "interface only" primitive exists in the loop. | | **RB-3** | **Invisible dependency graph.** "What breaks if I change this?" means grepping — false positives from same-name symbols, false negatives from re-exports. | | **RB-4** | **Diffs conflate moved with changed.** Rename, reformat and real semantic change all arrive as the same noise. | | **RB-5** | **Generated code is a blind spot.** With macros, the thing that runs is not the thing that was read. | | **RB-6** | **No stable identity across time.** A summary silently rots, and nothing reports which recorded facts are still true. | | **RB-7** | **Repeated structure is unavoidable cost.** Hundreds of components with identical prop ceremony, paid for on every read and useless as an edit anchor. | | **RB-8** | **Understanding cannot be cached.** Every session starts cold, and the hand-written substitute — a `CLAUDE.md` — drifts. | Content addressing answers seven of the eight from a single decision. That is the entire argument for it. | Barrier | What the IR does | | - | - | | RB-1 | Nodes are addressed by hash, or by a unique structural path (`connectivity_bar/fn:retry`) — never by line number or string match | | RB-2 | `mz outline` serves the interface at a fraction of source cost; any single node can be fetched alone | | RB-3 | Reference edges are explicit in the node, so "who points at this hash" is a lookup, not a search | | RB-4 | A moved node keeps its hash. Only real change alters a hash, so a diff *is* the semantic diff | | RB-5 | No macros: the IR is ground truth and is directly inspectable | | RB-6 | The hash **is** the identity, permanently. A recorded fact is re-verified by asking whether that hash still exists | | RB-7 | Structural sharing: identical subtrees are one stored node | | RB-8 | The store is derived and machine-verified — the thing a hand-written `CLAUDE.md` was failing to be | RB-5 is the exception only in the sense that the syntax already solved it: the view grammar is native rather than a macro, so the IR inherits the property rather than fixing it. ## The node model ```rust theme={null} Node { kind: &str // "component" | "prop" | "enum" | "variant" | "element" | ... label: Option // the author-visible name, when the kind has one fields: [(String, String)] // leaf data, sorted by key children: [Hash] // ordered; order is semantic } ``` A node's hash covers its **canonical serialization**, which includes its children's hashes. That makes the store a Merkle DAG: change a leaf and every ancestor's hash changes, while every untouched sibling keeps its own. ### Canonical serialization Hashing is only stable if serialization is exact, so the form is fully specified and **length-prefixed rather than delimiter-separated** — a delimiter can appear inside a value and silently merge two different nodes into one hash: ```text theme={null} kind_len ":" kind label_len ":" label (or "-" when absent) field_count ":" for each, in key order: key_len ":" key value_len ":" value child_count ":" for each, in order: hash_hex ``` Fields are sorted by key so that authoring order cannot change identity. Children are **not** sorted, because their order is meaning — a view's children are a sequence. ### The hash function SHA-256, hand-rolled, verified against the published NIST vectors. The house convention is to hand-roll small, fully-specified things rather than take a dependency, and SHA-256 qualifies precisely because it is completely specified with official test vectors, so correctness is *verifiable* rather than assumed. RFC-0003 states the limit of that plainly, and so does this page: > This is a content-identity function, not a security boundary. Collision resistance > matters; side channels do not. If a hash ever becomes a trust boundary — signed releases, > a shared public store — swap in a reviewed crate at that point. Hashes display as the first 12 hex characters. ## Names are metadata, which is what makes renames free The store maps `Hash → Node`. A **separate** namespace maps `name → Hash`. Nothing inside a node records the name of anything it references — only hashes. * **A rename touches one namespace entry.** No call site changes, because no call site ever held the name. That removes the whole class of exhaustive multi-site refactor, which is precisely what small models perform worst at. * **Source carries no import lines.** This is the mechanism underneath the syntax-level rule: source says *what*, the namespace says *which*. * **Two components can be compared for identity, not similarity.** Same hash means genuinely the same logic, wherever it came from. ## What is implemented, and what is designed `mz hash` — the root hash and node count after sharing. `mz outline` — the interface form. `mz ir` — the flat node listing with hashes and structural paths. `mz refs ` — every node referencing this one (RB-3). `mz path ` — the structural path. `mz patch ` — the write half of RB-1. `mz diff ` — node-level added / removed / changed, with moves reported as moves. The store is **in-memory only**. On-disk format, and whether the store is shared between projects, is an open question with a caching payoff and a trust question attached. ## A correction the implementation forced This is worth reading because it is the shape of the whole project in one paragraph: a claim was made, a measured test caught it, and the claim was narrowed rather than defended. RFC-0003's first draft called structural paths *"stable across edits"*. Two `row` siblings inside `alert`'s view collided on the same path, which would have made a patch address ambiguous. Two things came out of it. Paths now disambiguate same-named siblings — by `slot` where one exists (`alert/view/element:notice/element:row@alert-title`, readable, and `slot` is already the design system's identity attribute), by ordinal otherwise. And the claim was cut back to what is true: > **Paths are unique and readable and survive reformatting; the permanently stable identity > is the hash.** Inserting a sibling can shift an ordinal-disambiguated path, so anything > holding a reference across edits should hold the hash, not the path. ## What the IR unlocks — not done yet Contract evaluation is no longer on this list: `mz contract` evaluates a component's contract block against the component's own declarations (RFC-0006). RFC-0006 §6 also settles that contracts participate in the IR hash, so changing a contract changes the component's identity. * **Incremental compilation keyed on hashes.** Only changed hashes and their ancestors recompile — the cheapest route to the sub-second check loop the charter names as a Phase 0 success metric. * **A cache that cannot lie.** The store is derived, not authored, so it cannot drift from the code the way prose documentation does. ## Measured From `compiler/tests/ir_measured.rs`, over the nine primitives and the two component examples, run at `6da2170` (services have no IR yet, so the example service is left out). They are reproducible rather than asserted: | Claim | Measured | | - | - | | Structural sharing | 242 shared nodes vs 248 isolated — 6 saved across 11 files | | Outline cost | Worst case 38% of source (`spinner.mz`); the test fails above 75% | | Parse + lower, whole set | About 10 ms for 11 files in a debug build; budget 400 ms | | Identity stability | Same source → same root hash; blank-line changes do not alter it; a variant column change reaches the root | | Rename cost | Renaming every component in the store changes **zero** nodes | The sharing number is small, and smaller than when the corpus had ten files. RFC-0003 labels it as such: eleven files is a tiny corpus, and sharing pays in proportion to repetition. At the scale of the 577-component registry the ratio should improve substantially — *"but that is a prediction, and it stays labelled as one until the registry is lowered."* ## Still open 1. **Local state.** Signal semantics must survive content addressing. 2. **The patch API's conflict model.** Two agents patching sibling nodes should compose; patching the same node must not silently pick a winner. 3. **Store persistence.** In-memory today. 4. **Contract evaluation semantics** — the subject language for assertions like `every button_size height at_least 48`. This documentation is built and hosted on [Mintlify](https://mintlify.com), a developer documentation platform.