verification-before-completion

A coding workflow rule that requires fresh test or verification results before saying work is finished, fixed, or ready to merge.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before final status updates, commits, pull requests, or other claims that code works. It guides the agent to run the relevant checks and inspect their results.
Why use it?
It prevents unsupported completion claims and catches unfinished or failing changes before they are reported as successful.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/dr-code/tessera/verification-before-completion
Any agent
npx skills add dr-code/tessera --skill verification-before-completion
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dr-code/tessera

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 720 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 $0.00043 $0.00720
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00360
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00144
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00072

Measured yesterday against content hash e5f839a17096, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

verification-before-completion 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 yesterday.

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/verification-before-completion/SKILL.md · 98 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 98 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Verification Before Completion

Overview

Claiming work is complete without verification is dishonesty, not efficiency.

Core principle: Evidence before claims, always.

Violating the letter of this rule is violating the spirit of this rule.

The Iron Law

NO COMPLETION CLAIMS WITHOUT FRESH VERIFICATION EVIDENCE

If you haven't run the verification command in this message, you cannot claim it passes.

Tessera Compliance Gate

If tessera MCP is configured AND a plan was registered with plan_save — run tessera-verify before any other verification:

1. Run the tessera-verify skill
2. Review the compliance report:
   - All plan checklist items should be marked done
   - All target files should appear in git diff
3. If items are missing: complete them before proceeding
4. Only after tessera-verify is clean: run unit tests + linter

This closes the loop between what was planned and what was built.

The Gate Function

BEFORE claiming any status or expressing satisfaction:

1. IDENTIFY: What command proves this claim?
2. RUN: Execute the FULL command (fresh, complete)
3. READ: Full output, check exit code, count failures
4. VERIFY: Does output confirm the claim?
   - If NO: State actual status with evidence
   - If YES: State claim WITH evidence
5. ONLY THEN: Make the claim

Common Failures

Claim Requires Not Sufficient
Tests pass Test command output: 0 failures Previous run, "should pass"
Linter clean Linter output: 0 errors Partial check, extrapolation
Build succeeds Build command: exit 0 Linter passing, logs look good
Bug fixed Test original symptom: passes Code changed, assumed fixed
Requirements met Line-by-line checklist Tests passing
Plan complete tessera-verify: all items done Checklist looks done visually

Red Flags — STOP

Read the full file on GitHub · 98 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. yesterday First seen · 98 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A e5f839a17096

Subscribe to this mod's changes

verification-before-completion is a skill published in the GitHub repository dr-code/tessera (1 stars, last pushed 21d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 720 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

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