Declared Impact

Renma provides a deterministic reverse projection over Declared Composition:

Focused asset
  -> which cataloged assets and Skills explicitly depend on it?

Renma reports declared impact. It does not predict actual breakage.

Declared Impact is change-review evidence over repository declarations. It is not runtime telemetry, semantic dependency inference, test selection, or a claim that any dependent must change.

Command

renma graph . \
  --view impact \
  --focus context.shared-api \
  --format json

--format markdown and --format mermaid are also supported. --focus is required and accepts the same stable asset IDs, repository-relative source paths, and absolute source paths as the other graph views. An unknown focus is a usage error. A resolved asset with no incoming composition declarations is a successful empty report.

Relationship Boundary

Impact traverses incoming forms of exactly these explicit relationships:

• requires_context;
• optional_context;
• requires_lens;
• optional_lens; and
• Context Lens applies_to.

It does not traverse references, conflicts, covered_by, superseded_by, ownership, lifecycle, policy, static support, extends, prose references, or inferred Skill-to-Skill relationships. Unresolved declarations are not guessed to target the focus.

Required And Optional Membership

Membership is relative to the focused asset:

all-required dependent-to-focus route
  => required declared impact

route containing any optional declaration
  => optional declared impact

The focus begins in required traversal state and is reported separately. Once a reverse route crosses an optional declaration, upstream dependents on that route remain optional. Lens applies_to preserves the current route state. If the same stable asset ID has both required and optional routes, the asset is classified once as required while provenance retains both route classes.

Required impact means the focus belongs to the dependent asset's required explicit composition closure. Optional impact means the focus is reached only through routes containing an optional declaration. Neither classification means the asset is broken, was loaded, must be tested, or must be changed.

Report Contract

Impact JSON is the complete machine-readable projection. The additive impact section contains:

• focus;
• requiredDependents and optionalDependents;
• requiredSkills and optionalSkills;
• provenanceEdges; and
• invalidIncomingDeclarations.

The focus and dependent assets include stable ID, kind, repository-relative source path, lifecycle status when declared, and direct status. A dependent is direct only when one valid composition declaration targets the focus itself. An asset with both direct and transitive routes remains direct: true.

Each provenance edge preserves the repository declaration direction:

dependent source -> declared target -> ... -> focus

It retains relationship, raw declared target, declaration index, source path, line evidence, direct status, and dependentMembership. Thus this repository shape:

Skill A requires_lens Lens B
Lens B applies_to Context X

is reported as Skill A -> Lens B -> Context X, even though resolution walks the index backward from Context X.

Invalid resolved incoming declarations remain reviewable but do not establish or expand impact. For example, a Context using applies_to, or a requires_context declaration targeting a Lens, is excluded from valid dependents. Existing scan diagnostics remain the governance finding source; the impact report does not create new scan findings.

Determinism And Cycles

The impact-specific DeclaredImpactIndex extends the unchanged forward DeclaredCompositionIndex and builds incoming resolved declarations once. Forward composition and scan do not pay that preparation cost. Reverse traversal processes (stable asset ID, membership) states, so cycles terminate and each stable ID appears once in the final classification. Distinct declarations and declaration indexes retain distinct evidence.

Provenance storage is proportional to reachable declarations, not the number of possible complete dependent-to-focus paths. JSON retains the complete edge set; human renderers use those edges without eagerly enumerating every path. Cycle-forming edges are preserved as real repository declarations and no path is fabricated from sorted cycle members.

Output Formats

Markdown emphasizes affected Skills, other dependents, declaration evidence, invalid incoming declarations, and the product boundary. Mermaid points in the original declaration direction toward the focus, uses solid edges for required declared impact and dotted edges for optional declared impact, highlights the focus, and explicitly labels any displayed invalid edge.

All formats are read-only, deterministic repository projections. Renma performs no network access, LLM call, runtime selection, prompt assembly, telemetry collection, Git-diff inference, automatic test selection, or repository rewrite while resolving impact.

Graph View Comparison

Form	Meaning
graph --view full	Repository-wide catalog graph.
graph --view full --focus <asset>	Direct incoming and outgoing neighborhood.
graph --view composition --focus <asset>	Transitive outgoing Declared Composition: what the focus explicitly includes.
graph --view impact --focus <asset>	Transitive incoming Declared Composition: what explicitly depends on the focus.

Use impact to prepare a review scope after a Context or Lens changes. Review the retained declarations and the actual change before deciding whether any dependent is semantically affected.