docir does not generate: the caller is already a model

Context¶

Two rejected mechanisms left the same question behind. adr-d657a09b8c4a measured cross-encoder reranking and dropped it; adr-46b69a581c65 measured pseudo-relevance feedback and dropped that. What remains in issue-fd086c0c6ab0 — HyDE, and LLM-authored query variants — cannot be measured at all without deciding something larger first: may docir depend on a text-generating model?

It is a decision about what docir is, not about ranking. The README promises everything runs locally, that only the first-run model download needs network, and that the semantic model is a quantized 67 MB CPU-only embedder. docir context is the command an agent runs first, every session, so anything on that path is paid on every task. qmd, the closest comparison, ships three GGUF models totalling ~2 GB and generates on every query.

Decision¶

No. Not as a dependency, and not as an optional extra.

The reason is not the install weight, though that is real. It is that docir's caller is already a generative model, and a better one. When an agent runs docir context "implement a new auth endpoint", a frontier model is holding the conversation, has read the code, and knows what the task actually is. Shipping a 0.5-1.5B quantized model to rewrite that same query is adding a much weaker generator underneath a much stronger one, and asking it to guess at context the caller already has and did not send.

An optional extra is not a smaller version of this. It is the same claim with a flag on it: the code path, the tests, the docs and the failure modes all still exist, and the question "does docir generate?" gets two answers depending on how you installed it.

What replaces it¶

The rewriting belongs at the caller, so docir should accept rewritten queries rather than produce them: several query strings in one call, fused the way the two backends already are.

That gives HyDE for free and better than docir could do it — an agent that writes a hypothetical answer and passes it alongside the literal task is doing exactly what HyDE does, with a model that knows the repository. It needs no dependency, adds no latency docir controls, and is a strictly smaller change than the one it replaces.

It is not thereby approved. It is a ranking change, so it ships the way ranking changes ship here: measured with docir bench first, on a corpus that matters, and rejected if the numbers say so.

What would reopen this¶

Evidence that the caller cannot do it — a measured case where an agent-supplied rewrite underperforms a local model's. Not "HyDE is standard", and not a competitor shipping one. qmd ships three; qmd is a search engine whose caller may be a shell.