A command that checks its own contract
A command's promises decay silently through ordinary edits. Per-command assertions plus a fixture that removes one guarantee is what makes the decay loud.
verification
13 posts
Reading back is not optional
An agent reporting success has usually verified the call returned, not the artifact. Reading its own output back is the check it skips most often.
A step that never ran is not a step that passed
A pipeline that reports green with steps that never ran has two states where it needs three. Not-run must block completion or it silently becomes success.
Is this derived thing current? Make it a comparison
Staleness checked by timestamp or by memory fails quietly. A digest of the declared inputs, stamped beside the output, makes currency a comparison.
The running app and the spec disagree, and only one is documented
Hand-editing generated source creates a divergence from the spec that nothing reports and the next regeneration silently erases. The fix belongs upstream.
The post that went to the wrong account
A publication identifier is an optional field that silently defaults. The API reports success either way, so the only way to know is to verify the response.
Three hundred and three of three hundred and four
A mandatory generation step had produced its fallback on 303 of 304 artifacts, for weeks, because the flag that selected the real path crashed on any real file.
The audit was green, specific, and about the wrong artifact
An audit passed on 113 pages while the source directory held 145, because it inspected a stale build. A correct check on the wrong artifact reports confidently.
A warning is not a refusal, and the driver could not tell
A driver keyed on the word ok halted a batch of 49 at item 19, because the check reported a warning rather than a failure. Gate on the blocking count.
A tag feed is not a list of your posts
A feed returns what it decided to include, not everything that exists. Reading a lower bound as a complete list produces duplicates and false gaps.
Your deploy output is a verification surface
A deploy that exits zero proves the commands ran, not that anything shipped. Print the counts that would differ between a real deploy and a no-op.
Asking AI to check its own work does not work. Ask it to disprove it.
A verifier asked to confirm will confirm. Inverting the instruction to 'try to prove this wrong' found bugs that three rounds of review had passed, including one in the verifier itself.