verification-ladder

name	verification-ladder
description	Use this skill when deciding how deeply to validate a change or when explaining confidence in a code change. Trigger for test planning, selecting the right validation rung, or classifying confidence as test-green, smoke-green, or watched-live-green. Do not use this skill for runtime root-cause investigation or slice close-out unless validation choice is the main task.

Verification Ladder

Scope: General.

Use this skill when the main question is: how much validation is required, or what confidence level is honest?

This skill owns:

• selecting validation depth
• mapping change type to test/integration/smoke/watched-run expectations
• describing confidence honestly

This skill does not own:

• runtime root-cause debugging
• proposal hygiene
• slice commit/push closure

Use $runtime-debugger when the issue is a live runtime failure. Use slice-closeout when the main job is closing an implementation slice.

Ladder

1. Crate or unit tests
2. Integration or e2e tests
3. Binary smokes
4. Watched live run

Decision Rules

Climb the ladder when the change affects IPC, networking, concurrency, supervision, routing, delivery, materialization, or environment-specific behavior.

Output Expectations

Report:

• which rungs were run
• what passed
• what remains unverified
• the highest honest confidence level