reverse-engineering-anything/docs/verification/cli-json-lines-2026-10-23.md

CLI JSON Lines verification — 2026-10-23

The analyst task was to export retained JavaScript observations as independent records while keeping their Evidence provenance, coverage and unknowns. JSONL framing stays in the CLI adapter; analysis and view projection continue to use the same application workflow as MCP.

Real artifact and completed workflow

The installed, locked semver@7.8.5 npm package was analyzed through the public analyze-javascript-application command, without executing its target code. It parsed 50 selected files and produced a 12,185,829-byte Evidence document. Preparation took 12.295 s elapsed, 12.648 s child CPU and 678.5 MiB sampled peak process-family RSS; preparation is separate from the export measurements. The artifact digest was 65c9cce0fbebc34824c1b9657a514e7c5525ab079b232ce9da095697271b7953. The saved Evidence file SHA-256 was b34627bc12894d4c749e5b24c60731dd5a7eaaf90c98954f0e585eb442d484c3.

Preparation ran on main 169512a35; the exact retained parent was reused by both refreshed export variants:

{
  "source": { "kind": "evidence-file", "path": "/absolute/path/parent.json" },
  "view": {
    "kind": "javascript-facts",
    "property_keys": [],
    "include_available_property_keys": true,
    "offset": 0,
    "limit": 256
  }
}

Each completed measurement executed one public CLI call:

node scripts/rea.mjs inspect-analysis-view request.json --format jsonl

The view contained 202 observation rows. Every before/after pair reconstructed exactly equal complete Evidence JSON, including identities, subject/provider, authority/confidence, locations, parent/view digests, links, original coverage, 17 view limitations and 20 unknowns. These source limitations remain limitations; exhausting this selected view does not establish complete application analysis. Before emitted one document; after emitted 202 rows and one metadata record.

Performance

Baseline: refreshed main 2443b949a48c3b2eba687e7381682e49e909d5b9. Both variants used Node 24.22.1 and the same locked dependency installation. Three alternating pairs ran sequentially, with fresh processes and warm filesystem/build artifacts. Node compile caching was not configured. Cold host filesystem caches and repeated analysis were not measured.

Completed export, median of three	Before	After
Elapsed time	4.510 s	4.576 s
Wait-accounted child CPU	5.876 s	5.987 s
Sampled peak process-family RSS	496.3 MiB	495.1 MiB
Emitted UTF-8 bytes	365,494	365,608
tokenx token estimate	99,004	99,041
CLI calls	1	1

The small observed overhead does not establish an analysis speedup. The 114-byte / 37-estimated-token increase is framing overhead, with the same facts and no additional tool/schema round trips. The identical request file contributes another 74 estimated tokens to each case. These are heuristic tokenx estimates, not model-specific BPE counts; orchestration prompts, agent reasoning and tool-definition tokens were not measured. Actual agent context consumption also depends on which rows the consumer reads. No token reduction is claimed.

Rows and metadata share the existing bounded JSON encoder and awaited writes. Token counting reuses that exact record plan, including context, and estimates one complete line at a time rather than materializing the complete export. A single line still must fit the estimator's runtime string limit. Token-count performance, much larger applications and time to first consumed row were not benchmarked.

The harness pinned the process family to two CPUs, used a 2 GiB V8 heap limit, GOMAXPROCS=2, GOMEMLIMIT=2GiB and two libuv threads. It sampled descendant RSS every 50 ms and would terminate the task at 6 GiB or 30 minutes. No resource stop occurred. RSS sums can double-count shared pages and miss short peaks; the V8 limit is per process and the sampler is not a kernel memory limit.

Validation

npm run check passed on the refreshed integration, including type checking, lint, formatting, dependency/metadata checks and architecture guards. The parsed output-control contract from current main is retained; handlers, launcher and reusable test drivers consume those same facts.

• 241 tests passed across 14 CLI/MCP/acceptance files: actual production MCP catalogs, authenticated Evidence reconstruction, invalid SDK values, ordinary and sentinel failures, generator streaming, formatter recovery, empty/partial views, large output, pipe closure and asynchronous final writes after cleanup success/failure. The run took 171.097 s elapsed, 203.968 s child CPU and 1589.3 MiB sampled peak family RSS.
• Another 60 tests passed across four consumer files, including ordinary graph reports and scalar selections refusing JSONL, malformed JSON input retaining diagnostics, managed CLI output and the direct SDK update-alias contract. These took 223.152 s elapsed, 262.538 s child CPU and 1079.2 MiB peak family RSS.
• A new negative control showed that calling a collection encoder for a single array-valued row undercounted tokens (15 instead of 21, 57 instead of 63). Emission and counting now share jsonLineParts; both cases and all 29 JSONL tests pass after the fix. The 241-test run includes these regressions.
• A real rea mcp doctor --format jsonl run reported healthy in one JSON line. Startup/validation failures, full-output framing and advertised help are exercised separately.

The opt-in verifier used shared 64 KiB leaves and independently checked complete output bytes and SHA-256, without retaining the complete encoded document:

Synthetic serialization fixture	JSON	JSONL
Output bytes (engine string limit: 536,870,888)	536,961,655	536,961,779
Elapsed / child CPU	9.811 / 10.197 s	13.940 / 14.451 s
Sampled peak family RSS	171.6 MiB	186.0 MiB

The JSONL run also checked its token count against the actual file line by line: 89,492,357 heuristic tokens matched. JSONL timing includes this extra counting verification, so the two fixture timings are not equivalent-workflow performance comparisons. Shared leaves keep input memory small; this verifies serialization expansion and counting capacity, not a 512 MiB application's analysis footprint. Both temporary output files were removed by the verifier's cleanup.

No resource stop occurred. Native provider behavior is outside this CLI change. npm run docs:check passed, including nine README consistency tests.

The refreshed measurements are in the refreshed/ subdirectory; earlier measurements against 169512a35 remain separate. Raw stdout/stderr, commands, per-run resource samples, equivalence assertions and summaries are retained under /tmp/rea-maintenance-20261023/5629/; they are not committed artifacts.