Embedding Generation Contract

Embedding generation is a contracted step, not a hidden side-effect. It may be deterministic or non-deterministic, but it must always surface provenance.

Rules

• Embedding generation must be explicitly invoked; no implicit embedding creation.
• Deterministic embeddings must be reproducible under a declared model/version.
• Non-deterministic embeddings must declare randomness sources and bounds.
• If vectors are omitted, --embed-model (or API embed_model) is required.
• The default local provider is sentence_transformers (optional extra).
• Embedding caching is opt-in only (--cache-embeddings); no implicit cache.

Provenance requirements

Every embedding step must emit the following metadata (see provenance schema extension):

• embedding_source
• embedding_determinism
• embedding_seed
• embedding_model_version
• embedding_provider
• embedding_device
• embedding_dtype

Status

Embedding generation is available via the local sentence-transformers provider when explicitly enabled.