Verification is a third actor, not a step

For the first three months, agents verified their own work. And they passed, every time. A hundred percent green, on runs we later found had shipped tracking plans with events that were never actually firing.

The fix wasn’t a better prompt. You cannot prompt your way out of a conflict of interest. The system that produces the work has every incentive to call it done, and none to prove it.

So verification moved out of the run entirely. It became a third actor: a platform process with no stake in the outcome, that trusts neither the agent that wrote the code nor the human who will approve it. It watches the artifact from the outside and reports what it can prove.

What that changed in the artifact model

An artifact now carries two independent facts: who produced it, and what the platform observed. They come from different processes, and the second can contradict the first.

• delivered_unverified is a real, first-class state. An agent can finish and still not have a shippable deliverable.
• ci: green is asserted by a run of the pipeline that the producing agent does not control.
• Every declared analytics event has to be seen live in the target tool before the artifact can reach accepted.

Why it matters

Honesty stopped being a tone we aim for in the copy and became a mechanism in the platform. When we tell you a deliverable is verified, it is because a process that wanted nothing from you checked it, and only then were you asked to open the gate.