dependents-bidirectional-index
OUT premise
Each node maintains a `dependents` set (reverse of antecedent/outlist edges), eagerly maintained by `add_node`, `add_justification`, `supersede`, `challenge`, and `convert_to_premise`.
Summary
The system keeps a reverse index so that given any node, you can immediately look up which other nodes depend on it, and this index is updated eagerly whenever the graph changes. This matters because without it, propagating retractions or status changes would require scanning the entire network to find affected downstream nodes.
Dependents
These beliefs depend on this one:
- dependents-index-is-fragile-denormalization — The dependents set is a manually-maintained denormalized reverse index that is never persisted and must be rebuilt on every load, creating a consistency obligation on all mutation paths
Details
| Source | entries/2026/04/23/reasons_lib-network.md |