Use BEFORE declaring any engineering task complete — feature, refactor, bugfix, audit sweep, or design doc. The gatekeeper for everything: it fires on every done-claim, no opt-out. The operational implementation of incremental engineering at the agent layer — an activation-function gate that blocks unverified "done" claims from propagating, surfaces credit-assigned correction signals when work fails the gate, enforces the bounded-iteration discipline that makes work compound rather than decay, and blocks self-consistent verification by requiring test fixtures be captured from reality rather than invented. Depth scales with risk (routine work: a short written pass; hard-ma…
