A first adopter's namespace migration went 341 red on one class: the
never-carried-field refusal firing on CORRECT filters against fresh and
sparse stores — a freshly provisioned tenant refused its own first
filtered read, with the did-you-mean built for typos firing hardest on
day-one stores where nothing is wrong.
The ruled cut: a WHERE filter naming a field no row carries is SERVED
OPERATOR-TRUTHFULLY — eq/in/range/contains answer [] (nothing carries
it, nothing matches); ne and exists:false answer ALL rows (the equally
true complement — a blanket empty here would be silently wrong, which is
why the simpler cut was rejected); exists:true answers []. Served from
the field registry, with the did-you-mean demoted to a once-per-field
WARN. orderBy and genuinely ambiguous addresses KEEP their hard typed
refusals: no truthful order exists over an uncarried field, and
ambiguity is a contract error while absence is data.
Mechanics: the negative operator absorbs the FIELD_NOT_INDEXED throw as
its empty exclude set (the clause-level catch correctly zeroes positive
operators only); the egress matcher already agreed. Plus the
provider-seam belt: a field refusal thrown by a replacement metadata
manager is normalized to THIS package's UnresolvableFieldError at every
filter call site — one class identity for consumers, instanceof works
(a first adopter's cross-package finding).
Conformance: tests/conformance/sparse-store-cut.test.ts — the shared
operator rows both engines run (positive-empty, negative-all,
fresh-tenant day-one, orderBy refusal kept, compound composition).
Gates: unit 2065/2065 · integration 832 · conformance 36/36.
