verification-before-completion
Verification Before Completion
Prove work is done instead of asserting it. Every completion claim must be backed by captured output from verification commands run in the current session. The most expensive bugs are the ones that ship behind a confident "it works," not the ones that fail loudly.
Iron law
No "done" without evidence. Assertions are not evidence.
If you have not run a verification command and read its output in this session, you cannot claim the work passes. "Should work" is not a status. "I believe it's correct" is not a test result. The only proof is captured output from an executed command.
Why this matters
False completion costs more than incomplete work. Incomplete work is visible, so someone will finish it. False completion is invisible: it passes review, merges, deploys, and fails in production. Every minute spent on verification saves hours of debugging, rollback, incident response, and trust repair. The cost of catching a defect grows by orders of magnitude at each stage: local development, code review, staging, production. Verify early and often, with evidence.