Parent-first emit order decision — 2026-04-23

Status: resolved owner decision Scope: packages/polyfill-connectors/* Layer: reference implementation quality / connector runtime contract

Context

The A++ follow-up audit found that several connectors with obvious parent/child stream relationships were historically child-first:

• gmail: messages before threads
• chatgpt: messages before conversations
• claude_code: messages / attachments before sessions

That was not refactor drift; it was the actual pre-existing behavior. The follow-up work intentionally inverted those connectors to parent-first and then benchmarked the cost, especially for claude_code.

Measured on Tim's real ~/.claude/projects corpus:

• legacy single-pass: about 11-12s
• parent-first claude_code: about 23-24s
• corpus size: roughly 687k records

So the decision is not "free correctness." It is a real contract-quality gain purchased with material extra wall-clock on large local corpora.

Decision

parent-first is the reference-quality default for connectors that emit related parent/child streams.

That means:

• parent records should emit before any of their child records
• connector integration tests should pin that invariant when applicable
• consumer-facing notes should call out any intentional ordering change

This is not promoted to a core PDPP protocol requirement. It is a reference implementation quality rule for live ingest semantics.

Why the owner chose this

The upside is not richer final data. The upside is a better live contract:

• incremental consumers can upsert the parent first and attach children without ad hoc buffering
• cross-connector behavior is more uniform
• agent-built consumers have fewer connector-specific ordering quirks
• the runtime/query story is easier to reason about during active ingest

For normal settled reads after the run completes, final data fidelity is not materially different. The value is in live ingest behavior and consumer simplicity.

Exception policy

Exceptions are allowed, but only by explicit owner sign-off after measured evidence.

The required bar for an exception is:

1. prove the attempted parent-first implementation is correct
2. benchmark it on a real corpus or realistic workload
3. show that the cost or complexity is high enough to justify breaking uniformity
4. document the exception truthfully for downstream consumers

Without that, connector authors should assume parent-first is expected.