Three dev-loop speedups:
(1) `make test` already on -n auto via pytest-xdist (was implicit
serial); 38s → 11s wall-clock = 3.4× faster on the 641-test
suite. Big inner-loop win.
(2) `make test-live` now also uses -n auto (live tests are
independent against the Hermes endpoint; concurrency=4 doesn't
overload it on the 17-test fixture set).
(3) `make backfill-concepts` (new) replaces the ad-hoc
`python -c "from aborist.concepts.extract import …"` invocations
fox was running by hand for the post-2026-05-02 concept-layer
backfills. Parallelizes per-shard work via multiprocessing.Pool
with CONCEPTS_WORKERS=4 (env-tunable).
Driven by scripts/backfill_concepts.py — runs every registered
extractor in EXTRACTORS (link_reciprocity, token_idf,
documents_fts) across every numeric-stem shard. Skips qa.db /
snapshots.db / crawl_*.db by default; --include-non-numeric
opts in. Wall-clock 189s for 4 wiki shards × 3 extractors vs.
~260s serial estimate; modest 1.4× speedup because SQLite WAL
+ FTS5 vocab queries are I/O-bound on a single SSD (4 workers
contend), but the unified UX & structured progress output are
the real wins.
(4) `make bench-qa-quick` (new) — 5-question smoke fixture × all
3 modes × 1 sample × concurrency 4. ~10s wall-clock. Sits
between bench-qa-smoke (n=1, ~30s) and full bench-qa
(~70min). Use as the inner-loop pre-commit signal.
Also: docs/concept-relations-design.md updated to point at the
new make target instead of the inline `python -c` block.
No behavior change in the test suite or LLM pipeline; pure tooling.
russell@unturf.com
9860423dca