/impact

/wicked-garden:search:impact

Analyze what would be affected if you changed a symbol. Uses the knowledge graph's impact analysis to find all upstream consumers of a database column, entity field, or other symbol.

Arguments

• symbol (required): The symbol to analyze impact for
• --depth (optional): How deep to traverse dependencies (default: 10)

Instructions

1. Search via brain for reference discovery:

   curl -s -X POST http://localhost:4242/api \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"action":"search","params":{"query":"<symbol>","limit":30}}'
   

   Use matching chunks as the starting set for impact analysis.

2. Trace upstream consumers: Use Grep to find all code that imports, calls, or references the affected symbol. Follow the data flow from database → entity → API → UI.

3. If brain is unavailable: Use Grep and Glob exclusively to trace the impact chain. Suggest: wicked-brain:ingest for richer lineage-aware analysis.

4. Parse the response which contains affected symbols and paths.

5. Report the impact assessment:

   • Affected UI Fields: What UI elements display/collect this data
   • Affected Entities: What entity fields map to this column
   • Affected Pages: What pages contain the affected UI fields
   • Show file:line locations for each affected symbol

Examples

# What breaks if I change this column?
/wicked-garden:search:impact column::USERS.EMAIL

# What uses this entity field?
/wicked-garden:search:impact entity_field::User.email

# Shallow impact (direct dependents only)
/wicked-garden:search:impact USERS.FIRST_NAME --depth 2

Output

## Impact Analysis: USERS.EMAIL

### Summary
- **Affected UI Fields**: 5
- **Affected Entity Fields**: 2
- **Affected Pages**: 3

### Affected Symbols

| Layer | Symbol | Type | File | Line |
|-------|--------|------|------|------|
| entity | User.email | entity_field | User.java | 45 |
| ui | profile-form.email | form_binding | profile.jsp | 67 |

Comparison with blast-radius

Feature	blast-radius	impact
Analysis	Graph traversal (all edges)	Lineage-aware (data flow)
Direction	Both	Upstream (consumers)
Best for	Refactoring risk	Database/schema changes

Use Cases

• Pre-refactoring: Know what will break before changing code
• Database migration: Find all code touching a column before altering it
• Safe changes: Identify low-risk symbols to modify first

Notes

• Requires indexing first with /wicked-garden:search:index
• For database columns, specify as column::TABLE.COLUMN or just TABLE.COLUMN
• For general dependency analysis, use /wicked-garden:search:blast-radius instead