vec/hyde queries reject hyphenated words (kebab-case, compound adjectives) as negation syntax

[rymalia]

Issue: validateSemanticQuery rejects hyphenated/kebab-case words as negation syntax

Title

vec/hyde queries reject hyphenated words (kebab-case, compound adjectives) as negation syntax

Labels

bug, search

Body

Description

The validateSemanticQuery function in src/store.ts rejects any vec or hyde query containing a hyphenated word — including kebab-case identifiers (node-llama-cpp, better-sqlite3, sqlite-vec), compound adjectives (real-time, long-lived, multi-client), and multi-hyphen phrases (state-of-the-art, end-to-end, copy-on-write).

The validator is intended to catch lex-only negation syntax (-term, -"phrase") in semantic queries, but the regex /-\w/ matches any hyphen followed by a word character anywhere in the string — not just at token boundaries where negation actually occurs.

Steps to Reproduce

# All of these fail with: "Negation (-term) is not supported in vec/hyde queries"
qmd query 'vec: how does the rate-limiter handle burst traffic'
qmd query 'vec: multi-client session architecture'
qmd query 'hyde: HTTP transport runs a single long-lived daemon shared across all clients'
qmd query 'vec: better-sqlite3 native module loading'

Via MCP:

{
  "searches": [
    { "type": "vec", "query": "how does the rate-limiter handle burst traffic" }
  ]
}

Returns: Structured search (vec): Negation (-term) is not supported in vec/hyde queries. Use lex for exclusions.

Expected

Queries with hyphenated words should be accepted. Only queries with negation syntax — a - at the start of the query or after whitespace — should be rejected.

Actual

Any query containing a hyphen followed by a letter is rejected, regardless of position in the string.

Root Cause

src/store.ts:2601:

if (/-\w/.test(query) || /-"/.test(query)) {

This is a character-level check, but negation is a token-level concept:

• -redis after whitespace → negation (exclude "redis")
• long-lived mid-word → hyphenated compound (not negation)

The regex cannot distinguish between these because it doesn't check what precedes the hyphen.

Scope of Impact

Hyphenated words are extremely common in technical queries — exactly the kind of content QMD indexes:

Kebab-case identifiers (package names, CLI flags, CSS properties):
node-llama-cpp, better-sqlite3, sqlite-vec, font-size, --no-verify

Compound adjectives:
real-time, long-lived, self-hosted, multi-client, cross-platform, non-blocking, single-threaded

Prepositional compounds:
in-memory, on-device, pre-built, write-ahead, out-of-band

Multi-hyphen phrases:
state-of-the-art, end-to-end, man-in-the-middle, copy-on-write

Short hyphenated terms:
e-commerce, A-B, re-index, co-located

Any vec or hyde query containing these patterns is currently unusable.

Proposed Fix

Anchor the negation check to token boundaries — start of string or after whitespace:

- if (/-\w/.test(query) || /-"/.test(query)) {
+ if (/(^|\s)-[\w"]/.test(query)) {

This also consolidates the two separate regex checks (-\w and -") into a single pattern.

Still correctly rejected (negation syntax):

• performance -sports — negation after space
• -redis connection pooling — negation at start of query
• -"exact phrase" — negated quoted phrase
• error handling -java -python — multiple negations
• -term — negation after leading whitespace
• foo\t-bar — negation after tab

Now correctly accepted (hyphenated words):

• long-lived server shared across clients
• real-time voice processing pipeline
• state-of-the-art embedding models
• better-sqlite3 native module loading
• built-in vs add-on features

Environment

• QMD v2.0.1
• Affects both CLI (qmd query) and MCP server (query tool)