Documentation article

Understand loss analysis

Use diagnostics to understand where semantics degrade or remain unsupported.

Guides8 min

Loss analysis is how we stay honest about transformations between formats that do not share the same semantics.

A successful conversion is not the same thing as a perfect conversion. The docs should make that distinction obvious early.

Audience
Integrators
Difficulty
Intermediate
Last updated
July 27, 2026
First transformation
See the conversion workflow before studying caveats.
Playground
Inspect live examples where the browser surface will surface warnings.

Why loss exists

Loss happens when the source format can express meaning that the target format cannot encode cleanly, or when the current generator does not yet model that meaning.

The toolkit should surface those cases as diagnostics instead of hiding them inside a best-effort output.

How to read diagnostics

This is especially important for downstream teams that may otherwise assume the generated result is safe to commit without review.

  • Treat warnings as actionable review items, not noise.
  • Separate semantic loss from formatting differences.
  • Keep examples of known lossy cases close to the supported routes.

What to document next

As the docs mature, this topic should evolve into concrete matrices and examples per route. For now, the goal is to set the right expectation and make the language consistent across the app.