fix: allow mid-term hyphens in vec/hyde queries (DEC-0054, ui-kit)

[fxstein]

Problem

validateSemanticQuery() rejects semantic (vec / hyde) queries that contain mid-term hyphens inside compound words or identifiers, with a misleading error message:

qmd query 'vec: how does DEC-0054 work'
# Error: Negation (-term) is not supported in vec/hyde queries. Use lex for exclusions.

The regex /-\w/ matches any hyphen-followed-by-word-char, so perfectly reasonable tokens trigger false positives:

• Document / decision / CVE identifiers — DEC-0054, RFC-0011, CVE-2024-1234
• Scoped npm packages and component names — @scope/ui-kit, material-ui
• Compound adjectives — state-of-the-art, role-based, multi-agent, chain-of-thought
• Hyphenated technical terms — token-based, context-aware, fine-tuned

Users see a confusing "Negation is not supported" error for queries that contain no intentional negation at all.

Root Cause

The regex does not distinguish between true negation (-word at the start of a query or after whitespace — i.e. syntax borrowed from lex) and internal hyphens in compound words (multi-agent, DEC-0054). Both match /-\w/.

Fix

One-line change in validateSemanticQuery() — anchor the negation regex to the start of the query or a whitespace boundary:

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

Now only true negation tokens (-word or -"phrase" at the start of a word) match. Mid-term hyphens pass through unchanged.

Testing

Added four new test cases in test/structured-search.test.ts covering common identifier patterns:

Query	Before	After
"DEC-0054 architecture decision"	❌ Negation error	✅ Accepted
"how does @scope/ui-kit work"	❌ Negation error	✅ Accepted
"state-of-the-art retrieval"	❌ Negation error	✅ Accepted
"token-based chunking"	❌ Negation error	✅ Accepted
"performance -sports" (true negation)	✅ Rejected	✅ Rejected
"foo -bar baz" (true negation)	✅ Rejected	✅ Rejected
'-"exact phrase"' (true negation)	✅ Rejected	✅ Rejected

Also verified manually against a 7,665 document production index — vec: "multi-agent orchestration" returns results (88% top hit) instead of the negation error.

Relationship to #418

This is a scope-reduced follow-up to #418, which you closed on 2026-04-05 with:

Closing — the underscore handling landed in #404. The remaining hyphen + validateSemanticQuery changes conflict with main and would need a rebase. Happy to revisit if you want to open a focused follow-up PR. Thanks!

#418 bundled two independent changes:

1. FTS5 hyphen handling in sanitizeFTS5Term() — preserve hyphens so the unicode61 tokenizer splits symmetrically at query time.
2. validateSemanticQuery() negation regex fix — this PR.

Since #418 was closed you took a different (and arguably cleaner) approach for (1) — sanitizeHyphenatedTerm() which splits on - into separate tokens. That change landed on main and already addresses the lex-side hyphen problem.

Piece (2) — the validateSemanticQuery() false positive — is an independent bug still present on current main and is unaffected by sanitizeHyphenatedTerm(). This PR isolates only that fix, with no overlap with your hyphenated-term work.

Fixes #414

Environment

• QMD: main (post-rebase, includes sanitizeHyphenatedTerm and the new rerank parameter)
• Platform: macOS (Apple Silicon), Linux (container)
• Node: v24.14.0

[fxstein]

Heads-up on the red Bun (ubuntu-latest) check: it's not caused by this PR.

The single failing test — Store Creation > createStore throws without explicit path in test mode — has been failing on upstream main itself for 14 consecutive runs since 2026-04-09 (the first red run was the merge of #537). Every PR opened against main since then has inherited the same red check.

I traced the root cause and opened a separate focused fix: #602. Once that lands, this PR's CI goes green automatically (verified — #602 itself is the first fully-green CI run on this codebase in two weeks).

No action needed on this PR; just flagging that the red check here is pre-existing and orthogonal.