independent-verification

independent-verification is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from affectionatec/agentic-engineering. It costs 90 tokens per session (2,183 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A verification workflow for checking whether coding work is really complete. It uses a separate verifier with fresh context instead of letting the author approve their own work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Checking completed tasks against their criteria, recording PASS or FAIL results, and keeping an evidence log in `docs/verification-log.md`.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of marking unfinished or incorrect work as done without evidence.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the agentic-engineering plugin — 12 skills, 2 commands, 1 agent shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/affectionatec/agentic-engineering/independent-verification
Any agent
npx skills add affectionatec/agentic-engineering --skill independent-verification
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/affectionatec/agentic-engineering

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agentic-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills, 2 commands, 1 agent.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for independent-verification

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/affectionatec/agentic-engineering/independent-verification.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/affectionatec/agentic-engineering/independent-verification)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/affectionatec/agentic-engineering/independent-verification"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/affectionatec/agentic-engineering/independent-verification.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 90 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,183 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00090 $0.02183
Opus 5 $0.00045 $0.01092
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00437
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00218

Measured 4d ago against content hash aeba326c86d8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

independent-verification scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/independent-verification/SKILL.md · 147 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 147 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Independent Verification — The Maker-Checker Gate

Core constraint: The agent that wrote the code never grades it. "Done" is a verdict returned by a verifier with fresh context — not a claim made by the producer.

Quick Reference

Use when A task or milestone claims completion; before any task is marked ✅ in STATUS
Skip when Throwaway prototyping the user has explicitly exempted, or pure doc typo fixes
Output Verdict entry appended to docs/verification-log.md (PASS / FAIL per criterion, with evidence)
Sequence IMPL PLAN task built → VERIFY → STATUS records ✅ (loops every task)
Iron rule Fresh context. The verifier never sees the producer's conversation, and never edits code.
Sibling skills [[project-kickoff-prd]] · [[technical-specification]] · [[architecture-decision-record]] · [[implementation-plan]] · [[status-tracker]] · [[git-workflow]]

Why This Exists

The deadliest failure mode of an autonomous coding session is not a crash — it is claiming completion without completing. Models grade their own homework too generously: the same model that wrote the code will rate it "looks good" every time, and an agent without an external gate declares "done" at 30% completion with full confidence.

The fix is structural, not behavioral. You cannot prompt a producer into objectivity — you separate the roles:

  1. The done condition is written down before work starts (IMPL PLAN task + SPEC acceptance criteria). The producer cannot redefine "done" mid-run.
  2. The producer builds and self-checks. Self-check is necessary, never sufficient.
  3. The verifier — fresh context, different conversation, optionally a different model — executes the done condition as written and returns a verdict with evidence.
  4. Only a PASS verdict moves the task to ✅ in STATUS.

Roles

Role Does Must NOT
Producer Implements the task, runs self-checks (lint, tests), assembles the evidence package Mark its own task done · edit acceptance criteria · write the verdict
Verifier Reads the done condition first, re-runs every verification command, inspects the diff, writes the verdict Fix code · inherit the producer's conversation · negotiate or reinterpret criteria

Read the full file on GitHub · 147 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 4d ago First seen · 147 lines · 90 tokens per session scan A aeba326c86d8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

independent-verification is a skill published in the GitHub repository affectionatec/agentic-engineering (4 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 90 tokens to every session and 2,183 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.