The engine-pair seam law: a zero-norm vector never crosses an engine
boundary. The index belt already refused to insert one, but the canonical
write and the vectored-noun ledger still counted it, so a near-empty store
whose only vectored row was zero-norm read "1 canonical vectored vs 0
indexed" and threw a not-ready error at open, and a store's own legacy
zero-norm VFS root could trip the same gate before its VFS-init-time cure
ever ran.
- add()/update() (single and transact()) now normalize an explicit
real all-zero vector to the unvectored [] shape before the dimension
pin, the ledger flag, and the index ops ever see it (loud, one warn per
write, canonical write still succeeds).
- The legacy counts.json derivation walk (scanVectoredNounCount) excludes
a persisted zero-norm row, matching the live ledger's definition.
- A legacy zero-norm VFS root now migrates at open, before the vector-leg
gate evaluates, via one O(1) fixed-path read (torn-tolerant — skips
rather than aborting init on a torn root, letting the recovery walk
heal it) — independent of whether a VirtualFileSystem is ever
constructed this session.
- update({ id, vector: [] }) (and the same op inside transact()) is now
the sanctioned, idempotent unvector door: index removal, exactly-once
ledger decrement, no re-embed, and it clears a pending deferred-embed
marker rather than leaving it to re-vectorize the row later. The
combination with deferEmbedding is a typed refusal.
- JsHnswVectorIndex.rebuild() now skips a zero-norm/empty persisted
vector when repopulating from canonical (the same belt the live
add/replace paths already had), and health()'s index-parity check now
compares HNSW size against the vectored-noun ledger rather than the
raw metadata-entry count, since a store's VFS root is permanently
unvectored by design.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>