Bench-v5 (5 themes × 3 questions × 2 paths, Hermes-3-8B) AFTER the
fold-stack lift + apply_title_boost wire-up to use _title_query_tokens
shows the SAME 12 regressions as the pre-wire-up baseline:
- 5 wrong-primary picks (Dr Who, Albert/Ahmed/Alaric the third/first,
Casa Batlló error)
- 7 STRICT→HYBRID demotes on correct primaries (Spider-Man, Ampère,
Dr Syn, Dr V64, Finnish Defence Forces, Hopewell Centre, labor
economics)
Diagnosis: apply_title_boost only reranks docs ALREADY in the
candidate set. body-only retrieval (default with multi_route=False)
never surfaces "Doctor (Doctor Who)" so no fold-aware rerank can
promote it. Legacy surfaces it via the title route. FTS5 porter
stemmer handles plurals but NOT Dr→Doctor or third→III, so the
SqliteShardCorpus.fts_title method also doesn't help here without
the folds applied at retrieval-token-gen time, not rank time.
Updated ticket with the honest assessment: 5 Path A stages across
v1/v2/v3 have now proven legacy query() doesn't decompose into a
library of helpers. Three forward paths offered for fox to decide:
A. leave default at providence, accept fold regressions (env
escape hatch ARBORIST_LEGACY_QUERY=1 already shipped)
B. flip default back to legacy, treat providence as
infrastructure for cloud-query/corpus-query only
C. keep both alive long-term — separate query2 command
russell@unturf.com
329337ac11