The protocol

Short enough to paste into a system prompt. It is the whole site compressed to the part you act on.

Before claiming work is done

1. Name the instrument.

   Say how you verified: a screenshot, an exit code, a status line, the file on disk. If you cannot name it, you did not verify.

2. Say what it cannot see.

   Every instrument is structurally blind to something. Look it up before trusting the reading.

3. Run one check that could fail.

   An observation that returns the same result whether or not the work succeeded has confirmed nothing.

4. Report the observation, not the inference.

   "Served bytes match disk, HTTP 200" is checkable by a reader. "It works" is not.

5. Prefer the resolved value over the authored one.

   Ask the running process what it loaded, not the filesystem what it holds.

Copy

Before reporting work complete: name the instrument you
verified with, state what that instrument cannot see,
run one check whose result would differ if the work had
failed, and report the observation rather than the
conclusion. Prefer resolved values over authored ones.

Reference: verifyfirst.dev. CC0, no attribution needed.