Verify

Teaching something wrong is worse than not teaching it: a confidently learned error is hard to remove and costs points on the exam or worse in a clinic. This skill is a deliberate attempt to break the material before the learner does. A check that could not have failed is not verification.

Paths like references/…, templates/… and examples/… are relative to this skill's folder, which carries its own copy of every file it names. Other Myelinate skills are siblings (../tutor/SKILL.md) and are installed as their own skills too. If a file is missing from your copy, fetch it from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/baney75/myelinate/main/ plus its path in the repository (references/…, skills/<name>/SKILL.md); if you can't fetch, work from this file and the router's core rules.

1. When to run it

Always, before delivery:

• Labs, study packs, answer keys, practice exams, flashcard decks over ~20 cards
• Anything graded, clinical/medical, legal, financial, safety-related
• Time-sensitive content: guidelines, drug info, reference ranges, technology versions, laws, statistics, "current" anything, recent discoveries, taxonomy and nomenclature revisions, exam formats (MCAT/USMLE changes)
• Numeric models and simulations
• Claims where the course and the field may disagree

Light version (self-check, §3 steps 1 to 4) for ordinary chat explanations of stable material. Full adversarial review (§4) for the list above.

2. Time awareness

Know today's date and treat it as a variable:

• Ask "could this have changed?" for each consequential claim. If yes, search for the current version and record the date/version checked.
• Prefer the newest authoritative source (current guideline, current edition, current docs), not the newest blog. Recent ≠ reliable; old foundational work is fine for stable facts.
• Flag claims in the learner's materials that are outdated (e.g., reclassified taxonomy, revised guidelines). Teach the course version for the exam and the current version, labeled.
• Exam proximity raises the bar: the closer the exam, the more any error costs. With little time left, verify the highest-weight items first.

3. The verification pass

1. Claim inventory: list every consequential claim, number, definition, mechanism step, answer and distractor-key.
2. Source each: course material (slide/page) for scope and convention; authoritative reference for fact. Read the actual source, not a snippet. Mark: supported / course-only / unsupported / contradicted.
3. Recompute: every calculation, unit, sign, significant figure, model output (run code). Re-derive every answer key independently before looking at the stated answer.
4. Match strength: "associated with" stays associated; "can" doesn't become "always"; one example isn't a rule.
5. Item audit: each question has exactly one defensible answer; distractors are wrong for a named reason; stem isn't ambiguous; no answer leaks (stem cues, longest-option bias, grammatical cues, alt text, filenames).
6. Alignment: every in-scope objective covered; nothing out of scope presented as tested.
7. Media: labels correct, licenses recorded, masked labels fully masked.

4. Adversarial review (the important part)

Use an independent reviewer, a fresh subagent with no stake in the draft (or a second model when available). Give it the material, the sources, the course scope and today's date, and instruct it to find errors, not to approve:

You are an adversarial reviewer for teaching material for [audience/course], exam on [date]. Today is [date]. Find every factual error, outdated claim, miscalculation, ambiguous or double-keyed question, misleading simplification, scope violation, and answer leak. For each finding give: location, the problem, evidence (source + quote or calculation), severity (blocks-learning / misleading / minor), and the fix. Check time-sensitive claims against current authoritative sources. Do not praise. If you find nothing in a section, say what you checked.

Then:

• Triage each finding yourself against the source; reviewers can be wrong too. Confirmed → fix. Disputed → resolve with a primary source or present both views to the learner, labeled.
• Re-review after substantive fixes (only changed parts).
• For very high stakes (clinical content, final-exam answer keys, published labs), run two independent reviewers and compare.
• Don't duplicate effort: one reviewer per artifact per round; don't rerun unchanged checks.

5. Report

Use templates/verification-report.md. State: date, what was checked and how, findings and fixes, what remains unverified, and what's approximate. Use precise words: drafted, self-checked, adversarially reviewed, tested (ran it), deployed (live), confirmed live. Never "verified" alone without saying by what.

Anti-patterns

Reviewing your own draft and calling it adversarial · approving because sources "look reputable" · checking only that code runs · trusting a reviewer's finding without checking it · searching once and declaring "current" · silently teaching the course's outdated claim · burying uncertainty.