Verification Before Completion

Discipline for proving work is done rather than asserting it. Every completion claim must be backed by captured output from verification commands executed in the current session. This skill exists because the most expensive bugs are not the ones that fail loudly — they are the ones that ship behind a confident "it works."

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 acceptable proof is captured output from an executed command.

Why This Matters

False completion is more costly than incomplete work. Incomplete work is visible — someone will finish it. False completion is invisible — it passes review, merges, deploys, and fails in production. Every minute spent on proper verification saves hours of debugging, rollback, incident response, and trust repair. The cost of catching a defect multiplies by orders of magnitude at each stage: local development, code review, staging, production. Verify early, verify often, verify with evidence.

Core Principles