Artifacts

chops-search build writes two kinds of file into out (default static/search/): content-hashed index artifacts, and the unhashed browser runtime.

Index artifacts

File	Loading	Contents
`model.meta.<hash>.bin`	Eager, gzipped	Complete vocab + per-row quantization scales. Never partial: a truncated vocab tokenizes silently wrong
`model.prefix.<hash>.i8`	Eager	Top ~2048 frequency-ordered rows, covering most queries outright
`index.<hash>.bin`	Eager, gzipped	Chunk vectors, document URLs and titles, keyword postings
`model.rows.<hash>.i8`	Range-fetched per query	Full matrix, headerless raw i8; row i at byte i × dim
`snippets.<hash>.bin`	Range-fetched after ranking	Per-chunk display text
`manifest.json`	Eager, revalidating	Names every hashed file; the only unhashed artifact

Filenames carry a build hash so everything above manifest.json can be served immutable. Artifacts are byte-stable given the same content and model: sorted walks, sorted postings, deterministic tie-breaks, so an unchanged site rebuilds to identical hashes and browser caches stay warm.

What changes when

You changed	Files that get new hashes
Site content	`index`, `snippets`
The model or `dims`	`model.meta`, `model.prefix`, `model.rows`, plus `index` and `snippets` (chunk vectors re-embed)
Nothing	Nothing; the build is reproducible

The runtime

File	Role
`chops-search.js`	Page script: overlay/inline UI, worker bootstrap
`chops-search.css`	Overlay styles, themed via `currentColor` and `.chops` custom properties
`search-worker.js`	The Web Worker that plans, fetches, and queries
`pkg/`	The wasm engine and its glue, requested with `?v=<build hash>`

The runtime files have stable names (they're referenced from your templates), so they must not be cached immutable; the wasm under pkg/ is version-queried and safe to pin. The deployment guide has the exact _headers policy.