verify

verify — the smith's own gate before handoff

A completion claim is a mark, and a mark must be earned. The community baseline ("no completion claims without fresh verification evidence") stops at freshness — it accepts any green command as proof. This protocol demands more: a check that cannot fail proves nothing, and evidence that outlives its tree state proves less than nothing.

A claim is sealed only when all four conditions hold:

The four conditions

1. Named before run

State the proving command before executing it, next to the claim it proves. Choosing the command after seeing what passes is how a test suite's green becomes "feature works" — the claim-to-command mapping is the verification, the run is just its execution.

2. Able to fail

Show the check CAN go red. For a bug fix: the reproduction failed before the change (or fails when the change is reverted). For a new test: it was observed failing against the pre-change code. A check that has never been seen red is a counterfeit seal — this is the condition the generic gates skip, and the one that catches assertion-free tests, mocked-away behavior, and wrong-file test runs.

An absence claim is only as good as the search behind it

"There are no callers", "the original has no such branch", "nothing reads this column" — these are claims about the whole tree, and their entire evidence is that one search did not find something. An existence claim comes with a coordinate anyone can open; an absence claim comes with nothing to open, so the cost of checking it is asymmetric and it tends to pass unread.

Condition 2 applies to the search itself: run it against a case you know is present. A pattern that finds nothing there was broken, not the tree empty. Report the command and the scope it ran over, so the next session re-runs it instead of re-inventing it.

An absence you cannot demonstrate that way is unverified and reads "not found", which is a different sentence from "not there". Never promote one to a document — a policy or a ledger row built on a search nobody could repeat is the same defect as a read reported as passing, with a longer fuse.