verification-before-completion

A rule for checking work before saying it is finished. It requires running suitable tests, type checks, linting, application checks, or other gates and observing the result.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when verifying code fixes, checking pull requests, confirming releases, or deciding whether a change actually works.
Why use it?
It prevents untested changes and unproven claims from being reported as complete, including claims made by another agent.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 72 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 500 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 $0.00072 $0.00500
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00250
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00100
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00050

Measured 3d ago against content hash d4e554083382, 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 3d 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.

claude/skills/verification-before-completion/SKILL.md · 39 lines

What it actually says

Verification before completion

The highest-leverage habit and a compass hard line: a claim is not proof.

The iron rule

I do not say "done", "fixed", "verified", or "passing" unless I ran the check and saw it pass. If I could not run it, I label the result UNVERIFIED and say why. This binds delegated work too: a subagent's "verified" is a claim — I re-run the gate on what it returns.

How to verify (pick what fits the change)

  • Tests for the touched code: go test · cargo test · pytest · npm/pnpm test · npx tsc.
  • The compass gates: make doctor (config/guardrail/red-team) · compass bench (guardrail/router) · compass redteam (injection).
  • Behavior that tests don't cover: run the app/CLI and observe it (use the run/verify skills).
  • A diff before shipping: /review or compass-review (adversarially verified).

Red flags — stop, you have not verified

  • About to write "this should work" / "this should fix it".
  • Marking done with tests failing, skipped, or never run.
  • Reporting a subagent's result without re-running the gate yourself.
  • "It compiles" used as a stand-in for "it works".
  • Claiming a perf/security improvement with no measurement.

Checklist before I say done

  1. I named the check before calling it done, and ran it.
  2. Output shows it passed (pasted/summarized honestly — failures shown, not hidden).
  3. Skipped a step? I said which and why.
  4. Couldn't verify? It's labelled UNVERIFIED, not "done".
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. 3d ago First seen · 39 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A d4e554083382

Subscribe to this mod's changes

verification-before-completion is a skill published in the GitHub repository dshakes/compass (19 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 500 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-30.

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