fix(search): show the passage that matched, not the opening of the body (#4243)
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Raised by the operator: are we limiting what comes back by character count,
and how do we verify the pertinent part is the part displayed?

We were not. mcp/tools/search.py sent (note.body or "")[:240] — a head cut,
with no marker that anything had been removed, so a 240-character preview of
a 4000-character record was indistinguishable from a complete short one.

The opening is the wrong span. The match is semantic and per chunk, and
semantic_search_notes collapses to best-chunk-per-note — its own comment at
the collapse says "the first appearance of a note is its best chunk". So the
system identified the passage that earned the hit and then discarded it:
select(Note, distance) kept no chunk column. A record could rank first on its
sixth paragraph, be previewed by its first, and be judged irrelevant on a
span the search had already scored lower. That biases against long records,
and it is self-concealing — the caller who does not open it never learns the
preview was misleading.

  - embeddings: chunk_index/chunk_text ride along in the select, and the
    collapse records the winner in report["best_chunk"]. Carried in `report`,
    NOT by widening the return tuple: ten callers unpack (score, note) at
    ~18 sites and nothing would catch the misses (lesson #4207). `report` is
    the side-channel this function already uses for best_available_score.
  - search(): excerpt / excerpt_is / body_length, and read_full when there is
    more. A caller that cannot tell a matched passage from a document opening
    cannot judge whether to look deeper, which is the only decision the field
    supports.

elide() moves to services/text.py so both callers share one copy, and it
keeps BOTH ends with a stated gap — it is the fallback for when nothing
identifies a better span than "all of it", not the goal.

Also fixes a guard that produced a false failure on the previous commit:
test_pull_telemetry checked `"project_id: int = 0" in body.split("\n")[0]`,
which sees only the first line, so wrapping get_task's signature over four
lines made it report a function that does take the project as one that does
not. Parsed with ast now, and proven to still reject an absent or
wrongly-typed parameter rather than being appeased by reflowing the code.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-21 08:50:16 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 4f2977b848
commit fdc07f2a2b
7 changed files with 245 additions and 50 deletions
+35 -4
View File
@@ -686,7 +686,16 @@ async def semantic_search_notes(
# to the note's owner, so filtering it would pin every scope to "own"
# and leave shared records unreachable by meaning.
stmt = (
select(Note, distance.label("distance"))
# chunk_index/chunk_text ride along so the collapse below can
# say WHICH passage matched. Without them the caller is left
# previewing the head of the body — a span this query has
# already determined is not why the record ranked (#4243).
select(
Note,
distance.label("distance"),
NoteEmbedding.chunk_index,
NoteEmbedding.chunk_text,
)
.select_from(NoteEmbedding)
.join(Note, NoteEmbedding.note_id == Note.id)
.where(
@@ -774,11 +783,23 @@ async def semantic_search_notes(
# Recover similarity (1 - distance); order stays highest-first.
scored: list[tuple[float, Note]] = []
seen: set[int] = set()
for note, dist in rows:
# The winning row IS the best chunk, by the ordering above — so this is the
# one place that knows which passage earned the hit. Kept beside the score
# rather than returned with it: the return type is list[tuple[float, Note]]
# and ten callers unpack it at ~18 sites, so widening the tuple would be an
# interface change to every one of them with nothing to catch the misses
# (lesson #4207). `report` is the side-channel this function already uses
# for best_available_score.
best_chunk: dict[int, dict] = {}
for note, dist, chunk_index, chunk_text in rows:
if int(note.id) in seen:
continue
seen.add(int(note.id))
scored.append((1.0 - float(dist), note))
best_chunk[int(note.id)] = {
"index": int(chunk_index),
"text": chunk_text or "",
}
# The best score anything reached, bar or no bar. Recorded BEFORE the
# filter because a call that returns nothing is exactly when it matters.
if report is not None:
@@ -797,8 +818,18 @@ async def semantic_search_notes(
report["best_available_id"] = int(best[1].id) if best else None
scored = [pair for pair in scored if pair[0] >= threshold]
if not demote_superseded:
return scored[:limit]
return await _apply_supersession_penalty(scored, limit)
final = scored[:limit]
else:
final = await _apply_supersession_penalty(scored, limit)
# Only for what actually came back, so a caller can key straight off the
# results without carrying chunks for records it never saw.
if report is not None:
report["best_chunk"] = {
int(n.id): best_chunk[int(n.id)]
for _s, n in final
if int(n.id) in best_chunk
}
return final
async def backfill_note_embeddings() -> None: