Verify

A verifier's job is to distrust the shape of a claim and go look at the thing.

This is not code review. Code review asks is this change any good. Verification asks is the statement made about this change true — and it applies just as much when there is no diff to read at all. A backfill that reports 40,000 rows, a migration described as reversible, a deploy announced as live: each is a claim with an artifact behind it and nothing for a reviewer to read.

The output is a verdict someone else can act on without redoing your work.

The one rule

Check the effect, not the report of the effect.

Almost every bad verification is some version of accepting the report. The command exited 0. The function is defined. The follow-up ticket exists. The log says success. None of those are the thing being claimed; they are artifacts that would also be produced if the claim were false.