| name | high-assurance-verification |
| description | Run the heavier pre-apply verification harness for a SENSITIVE change, one that is gate-blind on correctness (a fit or semantic property no existence gate can check), delicate at scale (a wide reshape or bulk mapping where a hand-edit is itself a defect risk), and costly to get wrong (a cited or downstream-relied-on artefact). Use before applying such a change, when the maintainer directs absolute-integrity rechecking, or when resuming a sensitive item left open in the register. It composes research fan-out, a mechanical signal pass over the negatives, two independent adversarial verifiers (false-negative and false-positive lenses, blind to each other and to the research), a programmatic invariant floor, and a deterministic scripted apply plus re-parse, so apply-correctness does not rest on the orchestrator's in-context precision. It catches the plausible-but-wrong value that survives every existence gate because the gate confirms the value is well-formed, not that it is right. |
| derives_from | ../../governance/high-assurance-verification.md |
High-Assurance Verification (the sensitive-change harness)
Overview
Most changes are adequately protected by the routine layers: the research-assistant discipline (workers research, the orchestrator re-reads and authors), the mechanical gates, and the per-change and periodic sweeps. A small subset is not. When a change carries a correctness property no gate can check, is large or delicate enough that a hand-edit is itself a defect risk, and would be costly to get wrong because the artefact is cited or relied on downstream, the routine layers leave a real gap: a wrong value passes every gate, reads as plausible, and ships.
This skill is the executable form of the high-assurance-verification governance rule. The rule states the discipline (when and why); this skill states the procedure (how). It is a heavier tier above the routine ai-assistant-workflow-disciplines research-assistant flow, not a replacement for it: it does not relax the routine apply-time verification, it adds independent adversarial verification and a deterministic apply on top. It is the proactive counterpart to the reactive trust-recovery-escalation suite: trust-recovery re-examines a window of work after process integrity has lapsed; this harness keeps a high-stakes change from becoming that failure in the first place.
The failure mode it prevents is observed directly: the fast first-pass research, uneven in depth, infers a "not applicable" or a value from a title or adjacent metadata without opening the source; a plausible-but-wrong value then survives every existence check because the check confirms the value is well-formed, not that it is the right value for its context. The harness produces the assurance rather than asserting it: independent adversarial stages hunt the misses and the over-assignments, and a deterministic apply plus re-parse makes the applied artefact correct independent of a long hand-edit.
The harness is not for every change. Invoking it everywhere is its own failure: it is expensive, and indiscriminate use erodes the signal that an item is genuinely high-stakes. The trigger (the three conditions in step 1) is a gate, not a default-on.
When to Use
- Before applying a sensitive change, one that meets all three trigger conditions (gate-blind correctness, delicate scale, high escaped-error cost). The motivating case: adding a control-framework column to the compliance matrix, where each cell carries a control code whose fit no existence gate can check.
- When the maintainer directs absolute-integrity rechecking of a change, regardless of the three conditions (maintainer discretion overrides the default trigger).
- When resuming a sensitive item left open in the persistent register (
.working/high-assurance/register.md) with status pending or in-progress, surfaced at /resume.
- NOT for routine changes. When only one or two of the three conditions hold, the routine layers (research-assistant discipline, the gates, the per-PR and corpus sweeps) are the right tool and this harness is over-engineering.
Process
1. Confirm the trigger and open the register row
Confirm the change meets all three trigger conditions: (1) gate-blind correctness (a wrong value is a correctness defect no mechanical gate catches, typically a fit or semantic property); (2) delicate scale (a wide reshape, a bulk mapping, a many-cell edit where a transposition or off-by-one is easy and not gate-caught); (3) high escaped-error cost (the artefact is citable, cross-linked, or relied on downstream). If only one or two hold, stop and use the routine layers. When uncertain, prefer the harness (a false escalation costs tokens; a false de-escalation ships a defect) and record the judgement so the threshold stays calibrated. The maintainer may direct the harness regardless of the conditions. Open a row in the persistent register (.working/high-assurance/register.md) recording the item, which of the three conditions make it sensitive, and status in-progress, so the item survives a session boundary. Apply guard-first sequencing: if a mechanical gate for the value class will exist, land the gate before the data so the data is validated as it lands.
2. Research fan-out
Dispatch parallel research workers to produce the candidate values, per the research-assistant discipline. Workers produce research, not final prose; the orchestrator remains the author and re-reads every claim against the live source. Record which workers ran and what they produced in the register row.
3. Mechanical signal pass over the negatives
Run a deterministic search (a grep, a script) over the candidate set to surface what the research may have under-examined. The highest-value target is the negatives: the items a worker marked "no fit" / "N/A" / "no change". A negative reached by inference from a title or adjacent metadata, rather than by opening the source, is the dominant first-pass miss. Route every negative that carries a signal of the target attribute to a verifier read (the open-on-negative-with-signal discipline): a negative verdict on a candidate bearing a signal of the target attribute must be grounded in opening the source, not inferred.
4. Independent adversarial verification
Dispatch separate verifier workers, blind to each other and to the research workers' reasoning, each briefed to refute, not to confirm. Use two complementary lenses: a false-negative verifier that re-reads everything marked negative ("N/A" / "no change") and hunts the ones that should have been positive (the misses); and a false-positive verifier that judges every assigned value against ground truth (the source title, the canonical definition) and hunts the ones that are over-assigned or mis-fit. The verifiers are independent because a verifier that sees the research worker's rationale inherits its blind spots. Each verdict quotes the ground-truth source. When more than one failure mode is plausible, give each verifier a distinct lens rather than running identical ones; diversity of lens catches what redundancy cannot. A stage-4 finding loops back: a miss is corrected and re-verified before the apply, not patched in afterward.
5. Programmatic invariant floor
For any property a deterministic check can verify (an identifier is in the canonical set, a count matches, a flag is set), run that check and require it to pass. This is the existence-gate floor under the semantic verification above it; it does not replace steps 4 or 6. Where a project gate validates the value class, run it here as the floor.
6. Deterministic scripted apply, then re-parse
Do not hand-edit the sensitive artefact. Drive the apply with a dry-run-validated, idempotent-guarded script keyed on an explicit map (source location to verified value), then re-parse the rendered artefact and confirm every applied value matches the verified map. This is the step that makes apply-correctness independent of the orchestrator's in-context precision: a wide reshape applied by hand depends on the orchestrator not transposing a single cell across a long edit; the same reshape applied by a re-parsed script does not. The script and its dry-run output are part of the record. The script running is not evidence the rendered artefact is correct; the re-parse is.
7. Close the register row and surface
Record the harness outcomes in the register row (the workers, the verifier findings, the invariant checks, the apply script and its re-parse result) and set the status to verified. Surface the findings (the verifier misses and over-assignments, the invariant results, the re-parse result) in chat. A verified row is retained for the audit trail; do not silently drop a pending or in-progress row. If the item cannot complete this session (a closing re-check or a license-gated dependency remains), leave the row pending / in-progress (or deferred with the blocker named) so the next /resume re-surfaces it.
Red Flags
- Skipping the harness on a sensitive item because the routine layers "probably caught it". The three conditions define when the routine layers are insufficient; "probably" is the inference the harness exists to replace with verification.
- A verifier that returns "all correct" without having tried to refute. Briefed to confirm, a verifier finds confirmation; the adversarial brief (hunt the misses, hunt the over-assignments) is what surfaces the defects.
- Letting a verifier see the research worker's rationale. Independence is the point; a verifier that inherits the research reasoning rubber-stamps its blind spots.
- Inferring a negative from a title. A "no fit" / "N/A" verdict on a candidate carrying a signal of the target attribute, reached without opening the source, is the dominant first-pass miss.
- Hand-editing the sensitive artefact. "I will just edit it carefully" is the failure mode the deterministic-apply-plus-re-parse step prevents.
- Declaring the apply correct from the script running, without the re-parse.
- Losing a pending item across a session boundary by not recording it in the register.
- Invoking the harness indiscriminately on changes that do not meet the three conditions, which erodes the signal that an item is genuinely sensitive.
Verification
The harness is complete when:
- All three trigger conditions were confirmed (or the maintainer directed the harness), and a register row was opened.
- The research fan-out ran and the negatives were signal-passed (open-on-negative-with-signal applied).
- Two independent adversarial verifiers ran (false-negative and false-positive lenses, blind), each quoting ground truth; every miss they found was corrected and re-verified before the apply.
- The programmatic invariant floor passed.
- The apply was scripted (not hand-edited) and the rendered artefact was re-parsed against the verified map with zero mismatches.
- The register row records the stages and outcomes and is set to
verified (or left pending / in-progress / deferred with the blocker named), and the findings were surfaced.
Common Rationalizations
| Rationalization | Reality |
|---|
| "The existence gate passed, so the value is right." | The gate confirms the value is well-formed and in-catalogue, not that it is the right value for its context. Fit is gate-blind by construction. |
| "One verifier is enough." | One verifier briefed to confirm rubber-stamps. Two independent verifiers with complementary lenses (refute-the-negatives, refute-the-positives) catch orthogonal failure modes. |
| "I read the negatives carefully; a verifier pass is redundant." | The dominant first-pass miss is a negative inferred from a title without opening the source. An independent re-read of the negatives is exactly what catches it. |
| "I will apply the edit carefully by hand." | A wide hand-edit makes correctness depend on not slipping across a long edit. A scripted apply plus re-parse removes that dependency. |
| "The apply script ran, so the artefact is correct." | The script running is not evidence the rendered artefact matches the verified map. The re-parse is. |
| "It is one cell; the harness is overkill." | If it meets the three conditions (gate-blind, delicate, costly), the routine layers are insufficient. If it does not, do not invoke the harness. The trigger decides, not the cell count. |
See Also
