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Verification and evidence

Whether "done" is a claim or a fact, and what would prove the difference.

Verification and evidence

A model reporting success is a claim. Evidence is a command that ran, its exit code and what it printed. This area covers everything that follows from accepting the first as if it were the second: features without tests, documentation without behaviour, APIs whose contract changed and whose contract document did not.

10 moments

Every moment that names this one. Derived from the moments; this page keeps no list.

  1. accepted "done" because the model said so, and paid for it the next morningA fluent completion claim is accepted as evidence because nothing wrote down, beforehand, what would have to be true. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  2. found a rule everyone believed was enforced and nothing ever invokedEvery artefact of enforcement exists — the rule, the script, the test — and no path connects them, so the control is fiction. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  3. closed an issue whose acceptance criteria nothing had actually checkedCompletion is recorded as a state change in a tracker rather than as evidence in the repository, so the two drift immediately. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  4. read a promise in the README that no test stood behindA sentence describing what the software does is written once and never connected to anything that would fail if it stopped being true. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  5. shipped an interface change whose contract document still described the old oneA contract maintained by hand beside the code it describes goes stale on the first change that forgets it. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  6. pasted a command from the documentation and watched it failExamples are written once, in prose, and nothing ever executes them again. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  7. had a green pipeline over generated files that no longer matched their sourcesTests exercise the code and say nothing about the committed outputs derived from it, so the build is green and the artifacts are wrong. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  8. lost a failure a worker had already reproduced, because the session endedA failure observed inside a session is described in that session and nowhere else, so the next one starts from the report rather than the evidence. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  9. published a page that promised more than any test could supportPublic material is written by a different act from the code, so it drifts ahead of the behaviour and nothing brings it back. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  10. could not reproduce a result because nothing recorded the state it came fromThe result is recorded and the conditions that produced it are not, so it is an anecdote rather than a measurement. cost: highoccasional Why, and what to do →