Remake, Not Remaster

"Rebuild from the spirit of the original, using current ground truth — not the old data dragged forward."

There Was a Working Predecessor

Bellows is not the first voice tool here. Before it, cwkVoices did the job: ElevenLabs synthesis, a persistent audio daemon for instant playback, a most-recently-used cache, custom voice IDs, a Streamlit dashboard, Keyboard Maestro wiring. It worked. So the tempting move is a remaster — keep the old body, sand down the rough edges, port the cache forward.

That is exactly the move Bellows refuses. It is a remake: rebuilt from the spirit of the original, on current ground truth, with a better schema, in one pass. Same lineage in the game sense — remake, not remaster.

Why the Old Data Is a Trap

Old caches, old voice IDs, old daemon state — carrying them forward means the new engine's first act is to trust artifacts it did not create under rules it no longer follows. The content-addressed cache in Bellows keys on every synthesis-affecting setting; a cache entry minted by the old tool has no honest key here. Importing it doesn't save a paid request, it plants a landmine that returns the wrong audio the day a setting means something new.

Archive Is Evidence, Never a Fallback

The retired body still exists — under an _ATTIC folder — as reference evidence. But it is never a runtime dependency. Bellows must never read the old checkout, cache, credentials, socket, or PID. The launchd runner refuses to start Bellows if a decommission audit finds any of the old body alive. A remake that quietly falls back to its predecessor's corpse is two half-systems wearing one name.

Code

A remake never runs on its predecessor's corpse·bash

# The launchd runner refuses to start Bellows if the retired body reappears.
# Archive is evidence, never a runtime fallback.
$ bash scripts/verify-cwkvoices-decommission.sh
checking active checkout ........ absent  ok
checking launchd service ........ absent  ok
checking listening port ......... absent  ok
checking unix socket ............ absent  ok
checking PID file ............... absent  ok
checking credential file ........ absent  ok
checking runtime cache .......... absent  ok
DECOMMISSION AUDIT PASSED -- Bellows may start.

# If ANY check finds the old body, this exits non-zero and launchd refuses
# to bring Bellows up. Missing Bellows-owned state takes the normal provider
# or explicit-error path -- it is never masked by legacy recovery.

Exercise

Think of a rewrite you've done or seen where the old data was carried into the new system. Name one artifact that was imported 'to save work' and one bug (or near-bug) that the import caused or could have caused. Then decide: would a clean remake — regenerate from source instead of importing — have been cheaper over the system's whole life?

Hint

The import always looks cheaper on day one. Price it over a year: every stale artifact is a question the new system will eventually be asked and answer wrong.