Glossary

Annotation

A persistent key/value pair attached to a symbol URI. Stored in the WAL journal — survives daemon restarts, file edits, and re-indexes. Readable and writable via lip annotate or the lip_annotation_get / lip_annotation_set MCP tools.

Key conventions: lip:fragile, lip:do-not-touch, lip:{agent-id}-lock, team:owner, agent:{id}:note.

Blast Radius

The set of files and symbols that would need to change if a given symbol’s API or behavior changes. LIP computes this by walking the reverse dependency graph (caller → callee edges) up to a configurable depth.

Results are split into:

• Direct dependents — files that directly reference the symbol
• Transitive dependents — files that reference the direct dependents, and so on
• Risk level — low, medium, high based on dependent count and graph depth

Confidence Score

A number from 0–100 indicating how precisely a symbol’s definition and references are known.

Scores are used to prioritize results and indicate analysis quality to agents.

Confidence Tier

The level of analysis that produced a symbol:

• Tier 1 — tree-sitter syntax analysis. Runs in <1 ms per file. No compiler required. Extracts function/class/interface definitions and name-based cross-file references.
• Tier 2 — compiler or language server analysis. Runs in the background on the blast radius of a change. Resolves generics, overloads, and cross-file references precisely.
• Tier 3 — pre-built dependency slice. Stamped at confidence 100. Never re-computed.

Content Hash

The SHA-256 hash of a file’s source text or a slice’s symbol JSON. Used for Merkle sync (detecting changed files) and as the registry key for slices.

CPG (Code Property Graph)

A graph combining the AST, CFG (control flow graph), and PDG (program dependency graph) of a codebase. Used for data-flow and taint analysis. CPGs are produced by SCIP-based tools, not by LIP. LIP Tier 2 exposes caller/callee edges (a subset of CPG data) but does not produce full CPGs.

Dead Symbol

A symbol that is defined but never referenced by any other symbol in the indexed workspace. Found via lip query dead-symbols or lip_dead_symbols. Common sources: removed features, unreachable code paths, unused exports.

Delta

A ClientMessage::Delta sent to the daemon that carries the full source text of a file and its URI. The daemon computes the content hash, re-indexes the file, and updates the blast-radius graph. Fires a DeltaAck response with a sequence number.

Dependency Slice

A pre-built, content-addressed JSON blob of all exported symbols for a specific package version. Built with lip slice, shared via the registry. Slices are immutable and identified by SHA-256 content hash. Once mounted, the symbols are available in the daemon’s graph as Tier 3 (confidence 100) anchors.

Embedding

A dense floating-point vector representing the semantic content of a source file. Computed by an external OpenAI-compatible HTTP endpoint. Stored in the daemon’s in-memory graph and used for nearest-neighbour cosine similarity search.

Configure via LIP_EMBEDDING_URL and LIP_EMBEDDING_MODEL.

File URI

A file:// URL pointing to an absolute path on disk. Used as the primary identifier for files in LIP. Example: file:///home/user/project/src/auth.rs.

Journal

See WAL Journal.

LSP Bridge

The lip lsp process. A standard Language Server Protocol server that proxies LSP requests (textDocument/definition, textDocument/references, workspace/symbol, etc.) to the LIP daemon. Editors see it as a normal language server; no custom plugin needed.

Manifest

A ClientMessage::Manifest sent by clients on connection, containing the workspace root URI and a dep_tree_hash (hash of the dependency lockfile). The daemon compares the hash against cached slices and reports missing ones.

MCP Server

The lip mcp process. Exposes LIP as a Model Context Protocol server, speaking JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio. Gives AI agents access to 19 tools covering blast radius, symbol search, references, annotations, semantic search, and observability.

Merkle Sync

A one-round-trip protocol for identifying stale files. The client sends an array of [file_uri, sha256_hex] pairs; the daemon returns the URIs that have changed or are unknown. The QueryStaleFiles message / lip query stale-files command / lip_stale_files MCP tool implement this.

Used by the LSP bridge on reconnect and by CI scripts to avoid re-indexing unchanged files.

Occurrence

A single use of a symbol at a specific location (file URI + byte range). Occurrences have a role: either Definition (where the symbol is declared) or Reference (where it is used). The occurrence index is what the blast-radius graph is built from.

Registry

A content-addressed HTTP blob store for dependency slices. The public registry lives at https://registry.lip.dev. Private registries can be run with lip-registry. Clients fetch slices by SHA-256 hash; the server rejects uploads where the hash doesn’t match the content.

SCIP

Source Code Index Protocol (Sourcegraph). A protobuf-based format for a complete, compiler-verified index of a repository. Used for full-precision baselines and data-flow analysis. lip import --from-scip imports a SCIP file into LIP as Tier 2 data.

Session

A single connection to the LIP daemon socket. Each connection handles one request/response pair and then closes. Clients that need concurrent queries open multiple connections.

Symbol URI

A stable, human-readable identifier for a symbol within the LIP graph. Format:

lip://<authority>/<path>#<symbol-name>

Examples:

• lip://local/src/auth.rs#AuthService.verifyToken — local file
• lip://cargo/tokio@1.35.1/runtime#Runtime — dependency slice symbol
• lip://scip/rust-analyzer/... — imported from SCIP

The authority encodes the source of the symbol (local, cargo, npm, pub, pip, scip). Paths within slices use the package name and version.

Tier

See Confidence Tier.

WAL Journal

Write-Ahead Log journal. A file (default: ~/.local/share/lip/journal.lip) that the daemon writes all mutations to before applying them in memory. On restart, the daemon replays the journal to restore the full graph state — the graph is immediately warm without re-indexing.

The journal is compacted on startup: only the most recent state per file is retained.

Workspace

The set of source files indexed by the LIP daemon. Files enter the workspace via lip index or explicit Delta messages. Files not in the workspace are invisible to all queries.