---
type: Changed
pr: 4874
---
**The planner and the phase researcher now query the knowledge graph through the `graphify` CLI when it is on `PATH`, falling back to the built-in reader otherwise** — the planner gets one graph query per phase and the researcher two or three, and that single shot decides which modules the plan treats as related, and therefore how tasks are ordered into waves. It was spent on `seedAndExpand`, which seeds by case-insensitive substring match over a node label and description and then expands a hardcoded two hops: the phase "User Authentication" seeds on `author`, `authoring` and `unauthorized` with the same weight as `authenticate`, and when the inflated payload exceeds `--budget` the trimmer drops edges by confidence tier. The CLI, already a hard dependency of `/gsd-graphify build`, ranks seeds (IDF weighting, trigram fuzzy matching) and context-filters before traversal; the planner additionally runs `graphify affected`, reverse traversal for the exact question its reference states as its own goal, which the built-in reader has no equivalent for and which is skipped on the fallback path. The branch is `command -v graphify`, the same degradation shape already used for Context7 to `ctx7` — no new config key (a graph can only exist if the binary built it, so binary presence is a self-satisfying gate) and no new tool grant (both agents already have `Bash`). `gsd-tools graphify status` now returns `graph_path`, the resolved absolute graph location, on both the present and the missing branch: the CLI takes the graph as `--graph`, and re-deriving `.planning/graphs/graph.json` would point it at a non-existent local mirror in exactly the umbrella multi-repo setup `graphify.graph_path` (#1825) exists to serve — for the same reason the presence gate in both prompts is now the `status` call rather than a bare `ls`, which was already blind to the override. Declared limit: the two paths return different shapes (CLI prose with no `--json`, built-in JSON with confidence tiers and `budget_met`/`budget_estimate`) and `--budget` counts rendered output on one and estimated payload bytes on the other; both prompts state this instead of implying a stable shape. With `graphify` absent from `PATH` the injected context is byte-identical to before. (#4836)