A single extra space turned a stable Make.com automation into a self-replicating loop of duplicate records. It wasn’t a bug so much as a missing definition of sameness.
Published October 12th, 2025
Each Clarity Audit Story documents a real system I’ve worked on — not as a case study, but as an architectural readout.
The goal isn’t to celebrate fixes. It’s to surface structure.
These aren’t stories of failure. They’re stories of what the system allowed, why it behaved that way, and what changed when it was rebuilt with intent.
The fixes are just a side effect.
The Problem
A Make.com automation implementing a standard “search before create” pattern—designed to be idempotent—created over 30,000 duplicate records across 1,000 work items. Despite checking for existing records before creation, every search returned “not found,” triggering new entries each run.
Root Cause
The search and create steps used slightly different formulas to generate lookup keys:
- Search: concatenated three fields
- Create: concatenated the same fields but inserted one extra space between two values
That invisible difference meant each newly created record was unrecognizable to subsequent searches. On average, each work item generated thirty duplicates before detection.
Contributing Factors
- No shared key definition: search and create formulas were written independently.
- No normalization: no trimming, case standardization, or whitespace handling before comparison.
- No database guardrails: no unique constraint or key hashing to reject duplicates.
- No anomaly detection: no monitoring of create frequency or volume spikes.
Resolution
- Standardized the concatenation formulas across both operations.
- Added trim and case normalization before all key comparisons.
- Ran a deduplication job using normalized key expressions.
- Implemented alerts for unusual creation volume.
Results
Zero duplicate creations after deployment.
Full cleanup completed within 24 hours.
Takeaway
Any system that must recognize the same entity twice needs a single, tested, and normalized method of identification—shared across every operation that constructs or compares keys.
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