verification-before-completion
Superpowers’ signature honesty gate: never claim work is complete, fixed, or passing without fresh verification evidence (pattern-evidence-before-claims). “Claiming work is complete without verification is dishonesty, not efficiency.”
The Iron Law: “NO COMPLETION CLAIMS WITHOUT FRESH VERIFICATION EVIDENCE.” If you haven’t run the verification command in this message, you cannot claim it passes.
The gate function is mechanical: before asserting any status or even expressing satisfaction — identify the command that proves the claim → run it fresh and complete → read the full output, check the exit code, count failures → only then state the claim with its evidence. A “Common Failures” table maps each claim to what actually proves it and what does not (tests pass ⇒ test-command output showing 0 failures, not “should pass”; agent completed ⇒ VCS diff shows changes, not the agent’s success report). Red Flags include the giveaway words — “should”, “probably”, “seems to” — and any expression of satisfaction (“Great!”, “Perfect!”, “Done!”) before verification.
This is a functional-validation discipline: it asks does it actually work / did the command actually pass — so it implements stage-validate (run it and observe), the empirical sibling of the quality gate stage-review. It has no direct counterpart in the other frameworks: where GSD’s gsd-verifier and OpenSpec’s openspec-verify verify the build against a goal/spec, this skill verifies the agent’s own claims against fresh evidence — a cross-cutting anti-dishonesty gate rather than a spec-conformance check. It is the clearest exemplar of pattern-evidence-before-claims, and kin to addy-doubt-driven-development’s adversarial self-check.
See Also
- sp-systematic-debugging — calls this to confirm a fix before any “fixed” claim.
- sp-subagent-driven-development — its “trust the diff, not the agent’s report” rule is this discipline applied to delegation.
- addy-doubt-driven-development — the nearest kin (adversarial fresh-context self-review).
- pattern-evidence-before-claims · pattern-anti-rationalization — the techniques applied.
- stage-validate — the canonical stage this implements; contrast stage-review (quality).