The Hierarchical Identity Architecture: Content-Addressing as a Computation Primitive for Software Relationship Intelligence

Content-addressing is typically an integrity mechanism. This paper shows it can also serve as the query execution substrate for software relationship intelligence. By organizing a Merkle tree around semantic boundaries (packages and relationship types), the identity structure itself becomes the query optimization layer: diffs are O(packages) instead of O(edges), cache keys are O(1) subgraph root lookups, and invalidation is scoped to changed packages.

Validated on five codebases (kubernetes 3.5M LOC, VS Code 1M LOC, Django, Cargo, Flask) with competitive evaluation against two commercial knowledge graph tools. Results: 2.75x more precise than GitNexus (p=0.0003), 193x faster indexing on enterprise repos, 11.5x better than grep baseline (d=0.92 large effect). 

Implementation: github.com/blackwell-systems/knowing