Credible claims: the brief before, the record after

Cheaper generation increases demand for scarce validation. The fix is two lightweight artifacts: a research brief that constrains what the system may do, and a claim record that constrains what may be reported. Applies to agents, workflows, sims, proof patches, data construction — anything delegated.

Three standing rules

1. Delegate only after inputs, boundaries, and completion criteria are clear. No open-ended "make it better" runs.
2. Require evidence, not confident conclusions. Every delegated task returns inspectable evidence: locations, diffs, diagnostics, counts, failing cases, logs — never just "done/looks fine."
3. Escalate anything that changes the economic object, the identifying assumptions, the inferential procedure, or the reporting language. Those decisions return to the researcher (the user), always. A standing user ruling counts as a returned decision; record it.

The research brief (before execution)

One short block, written before launching the work:

• Question / target: what exactly is being estimated, proved, built.
• Completion: what counts as done; what results would not answer the question.
• Prohibited substitutions: what the system may not silently change (estimand, sample, assumptions, statement of a theorem, benchmark spec).
• Known failure modes: what tends to go wrong here; the checks matched to each.
• Required evidence: what must come back (numbers, locations, diffs, diagnostics).
• Escalation triggers: which findings/decisions must return to the user before proceeding.
• Blocked-route rule: a route that depends on unavailable data, an unsupported assumption, or an unproved result is marked blocked — a scientific outcome, not an instruction to search until a favorable answer appears.