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Impact on the other surfaces

The same impact analysis the CLI runs, projected through the MCP tool and the dashboard. Given the same snapshot all three return the identical answer; what differs is where the snapshot may come from.

MCP tool: pacto_impact

The same analysis is exposed to agents as the read-only pacto_impact MCP tool. It belongs to the fleet query family — see MCP integration — and shares that family's boundaries: it projects the operational graph, observes nothing, changes nothing and authorizes nothing. An agent uses pacto_impact to understand a proposed change's blast radius before recommending a review, never to act on it. Every answer carries asOf, completeness and limitations, so an agent can tell how much of the system the answer actually covers.

It is the one fleet tool that does not serve a frozen snapshot: it resolves its two refs and rebuilds the graph on every call, so its asOf advances while the pacto_fleet_* tools' stays at the value they were started with. When the two disagree they are describing two moments, not two systems — see what a session freezes.

Dashboard: Change analysis

In the dashboard this analysis is one half of the Change analysis workspace, served by the /api/fleet/impact endpoint and returning the same result model the CLI and MCP tool produce. The workspace answers both halves of a single question on one screen: what changed between two revisions of a service, and what that change affects.

Change analysis is contextual: it is entered from the service or revision you are already looking at (the Compare revisions action), the revision selectors are populated from that service's known revisions, and the analyzed pair is in the URL so the answer itself is shareable. It analyzes the currently published snapshot — the same one the Operational Graph shows — so the answer's snapshotId matches the graph, never a divergent rebuild. Breaking and potentially-breaking changes are shown separately, and each consumer carries its path to the changed service, compatibility range and verdict, and confidence with an explanation.

Because observed evidence must have a real source, the dashboard's include-observed control is enabled only when the host declares an observation source (reported by GET /api/capabilities); otherwise it is disabled — the dashboard never ships a control that would have no effect.