Product validation

Use the product to judge whether one accepted journey works. Treat the implementation, acceptance contract, and verification tooling as read-only. Mutate only authorized validation state, and never repair the product while judging it.

For final delivery acceptance, run in a fresh context independent from the agents that implemented and finished the code. Slice passes may use the method below within their existing roles; they do not claim independent final acceptance. Trust direct observations, not summaries or a green technical suite.

Establish the judgment

Read the accepted journey from an implementation specification or another explicitly accepted source. Require enough information to name, when material:

• the commit, build, deployed revision, or exact working-tree state under judgment;
• the actor and starting state;
• the user action;
• the required observable result and any materially forbidden result;
• the environment, identity, and test data;
• isolation or reset and cleanup boundaries;
• the evidence that can distinguish success from failure.

Return Inconclusive with the exact missing decision when a material criterion is absent or ambiguous. Do not invent criteria, weaken them, or rewrite them around current behavior.