Verify Done

"Should work" is the most expensive phrase in agentic coding. Every unverified claim converts the human's one review pass into a debugging session, and after two of those they stop trusting anything you say. The standard is simple: evidence or it did not happen.

The gate

Run every check that applies to the change. Actually run them; predicting their output is exactly the failure this skill exists to prevent.

1. It builds. Compile, bundle, or import the changed code. A syntax error in a "completed" task is a full trust reset.
2. Tests pass, with numbers. Run the relevant suite and read the summary line. Report real figures ("42 passed, 0 failed, 3 skipped"), never vibes ("tests look good"). If the suite was already failing before your change, report your delta against that baseline.
3. Lint and typecheck are clean, or at minimum unchanged from the baseline you recorded before starting.
4. The actual thing was exercised. Not just its unit tests: run the script on a real input, hit the endpoint with curl, load the page, invoke the CLI command the user will invoke. Show the observed output. Unit tests prove the pieces; one real execution proves the assembly.
5. The diff is audited. git status and git diff show only intended changes. No stray files, no leftover debug code, no accidental formatting churn across files you never meant to touch.
6. Docs and config kept up. If behavior, flags, environment variables, or setup steps changed, the README or relevant doc changed with them.

Reporting rules

• State what was verified and HOW: the command run and the result observed.
• State plainly what was NOT verified and why: no staging environment, needs credentials, requires hardware, whatever the truth is. An honest gap the human can check beats a confident claim they cannot.
• Never round "probably" up to "definitely". Calibrated language is a feature: "tests pass; I could not verify the OAuth flow end to end because it needs live credentials" is a senior engineer's sentence.
• If verification is genuinely impossible in this environment, say so explicitly rather than skipping the step in silence.

When the gate fails

Then the task is not done. Go back to work; do not negotiate with the gate, do not present the failure buried in the middle of a success narrative, and do not disable the check that failed. A red gate reported honestly costs a little pride. A green lie costs the relationship.