The enum qualifying how we know an edge exists. It is a mandatory attribute of every edge, from a closed set of four values.

Value	Meaning	Examples
declared	written literally in the source	explicit extends, direct call
derived	computed by analysis	Go implicit interface satisfaction, TS structural conformance, Python protocols, Rust blanket impls
dynamic-candidate	dispatch not statically resolvable; targets are guesses	multimethods, PHP __call, duck typing, dyn Trait
generated	produced by macro/annotation expansion	Rust #[derive], Lombok, Python decorators, Clojure macros

The order above is the order the header dictionary’s enum declares.

Consequences

Facts and inferences never mix. An analysis that wants facts only filters on declared; that is what --declared-only does on every command that accepts it, and the resulting view is named in the report’s header.

A folded arrow keeps the set. Folding to module or type level aggregates base edges, so a folded arrow carries the sorted set of the provenances underneath it. Renderings collapse that to one bit — an arrow is inferred when any base edge is not declared — and precompute it, so no renderer can get the rule wrong:

Rendering	Fact	Inference
DOT, PlantUML	solid edge	dashed edge
City arrows	inferred: false	inferred: true
Navigator rows	provenance: "declared"	any other value

Wiring is dynamic-candidate. analyze --report wiring and --framework spring derive dependency-injection edges from written annotations: the container’s choice is not statically resolvable and every candidate is a guess, so the value is dynamic-candidate and the report says so.

Why the distinction is a value on every edge rather than a flag on a report: Facts vs inferences.