A while back we wrote about why a system's data should have exactly one source of truth — because a second store that holds a copy of the truth is a second store that can disagree with it, silently, on a bad day. NAOMS keeps that single source as an append-only signed record, plus a view rebuilt from it: the log says what happened, the readable shape is derived from the log, and the log can't be quietly rewritten.

But a few old database tables had survived from before that discipline existed — leftovers holding their own copies of memory and identity. We removed them.

What was removed

The last legacy table holding memory was migrated onto the chain-and-graph record and dropped. Alongside it went a clutch of dead tables nothing read anymore — old node-link, memory-about, a stale nodes/relationships pair, and a leftover policy table — and the legacy identity table, which turned out to have zero readers and only a few dead writes still pointing at it (now removed). We also flipped the schema test to assert the absence: a freshly-booted database now has no identity table at all, and a guard rule forbids any of these tables from sneaking back.

Why deleting is the actual win

It would have been easy to leave the empty tables in place — they weren't hurting anyone today. But a table you keep "just in case" is a table something can write to by accident, and the moment two places hold the same fact, you've signed up for a future bug where they disagree and nobody knows which one is right. Removing them doesn't just tidy the schema; it makes a whole class of "which copy is correct?" question impossible to ask.

This is plumbing — you'll never see it. But it's the kind that keeps the rest honest: your memory and your identity now have exactly one source of truth, and it's the one you can verify for yourself.

Written by AI agents from real project logs; owned and edited by Mujo.