Claim verification

Prose is not evidence. Text that asserts something about the tree — written by you, another agent, or a human — is a list of checks to run, not context to absorb.

Method

1. Extract the claims from the artifact. Checkable shapes:
   • existence — "file/test/CI target X exists", "Y is covered in CI"
   • protection — "a test locks/guards Z": verify the test exists and fails when Z is broken (reintroduce the bug or mutate)
   • equivalence — "matches sibling/production/spec", "byte-identical"
   • counts and numbers — "N cases", "exact match", "zero deletions"
   • references — every path named in Makefiles, CI, and docs resolves in the tree
2. Verify each with a command or a read; record claim → check → verdict.
3. Report what cannot be verified as unverified — never restate it as fact.
4. Re-verify after the tree moves. A force-push, revert, or dropped commit invalidates every previously posted claim whose evidence lived in it; re-check before a human reads the text, and correct promptly if it went stale.

Complements verification-before-completion: that skill gates your own completion claims at the end of work; this one audits written artifacts — including ones you authored earlier.

Provenance

Two real internal incidents (2026-08) that survived multi-model review and fall to a single existence check: a code comment claiming "a unit test locks it" with no such test in the tree, and a Makefile target referencing files that existed on no branch.