Root cause: grid contacts (fundraising_contacts) are the SAME people as the
contacts table (the app syncs them by name/email), but resolution matched grid
rows by (name + investor-canon) where the two sides derive the investor key from
different tables that rarely line up — so nearly every grid contact minted a
duplicate person (715 + ~692 ≈ 1406), and the duplicate finder then flagged each
twin against its real self (~676 candidates).
Fix (entity_resolution.py):
- Grid pass matches a grid contact to its existing contacts-table person by
PROVABLE keys only (exact email, else exact name within the same investor) and
records membership; on a miss it MINTS NOTHING (the old else-branch mint was the
double-count source, and guessing by name across firms risks binding two
different same-named people).
- Targeted, audited cleanup soft-deletes leftover grid-only "twins" (person rows
with no 'contacts' link) and superseded pre-:48 'lp'/'organization' rows, guarded
so any row carrying enrichment/human data is never dropped (guardrail #3); the
tombstoned ids are logged to interaction_log (guardrail #5).
- _upsert_entity clears deleted_at on conflict so a re-emitted id is un-tombstoned
(no permanent burial); fuzzy-merge losers stay buried via _redirect.
entity_merge.py / server.py: the duplicate queue + pending count now filter to
candidates whose both sides are still live, so self-healed twins drop out.
Verified: offline reproduction test (backend/ingest/test_entity_resolution.py,
10/10) reproduces the 1406-style doubling and proves it collapses; no regression
on the synthetic dev set; two adversarial review passes. Known pre-existing
identity-key weaknesses (same name+firm+no email collision; shared role inbox
over-link) are unchanged by this fix and will be resolved structurally by the
contact_id link in the grid/contacts unification.
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Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Keysat