Exposing this information shouldn’t change any of the core inference paths as it’s just changing what gets extracted out of the trie structure at decode time, so it should be safe to do without any flags. In fact that’s probably a good test to see if something is wrong with the patch: if it’s changing the output then it’s doing too much!
As for top_paths, if you change it to a bigger value you’ll get a vector with more than just the highest confidence Output from the decoder. We have a long standing issue for exposing this parameter in the API, here: https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech/issues/432 It requires some thought on how to expose multiple transcriptions at the API level, maybe leveraging our Metadata structure is the easiest way.