chain-of-verification

name	chain-of-verification
description	Before shipping a factual or analytical answer, draft it, generate independent verification questions about its own claims, answer those, and revise the draft to fix what the checks expose. Use on research answers, multi-claim summaries, audits, anything where a confident wrong detail is costly. Trigger with /chain-of-verification or "verify your own answer", "CoVe", "double-check each claim".
version	0.1.0
user-invocable	true
metadata	{"emoji":"✅"}

chain-of-verification

Draft, then interrogate your own draft. Generate verification questions about each claim, answer them independently, and rewrite the answer to match the verified facts. Catches confident-but-wrong details before they ship.

Why this exists (evidence)

• Chain-of-Verification (Dhuliawala et al., arXiv:2309.11495): a draft -> plan verification questions -> answer them independently -> revise loop measurably reduces hallucination across list, QA, and long-form generation vs answering in one pass.
• Key mechanism: answering the verification questions WITHOUT looking at the original draft prevents the model from rubber-stamping its own mistake.

When to use

• Multi-claim answers: research summaries, comparisons, "list all X", audits, post-mortems.
• Any answer where one wrong fact (a version, a number, an API, a name) poisons the whole.
• NOT for trivial single-fact answers (use cite-guard) or pure opinion.

The loop

1. Draft the answer normally.
2. Plan checks: extract each discrete factual claim and write one verification question per claim ("Does function X take arg Y?", "Was the release date Z?").
3. Answer independently: answer each verification question on its own, ideally by going to the source (read the code, fetch the doc, run it), NOT by re-reading the draft. Independence is the whole point.
4. Revise: correct any claim the checks contradict. Drop claims you cannot verify or mark them unverified.
5. Ship the revised answer.

How to run it

• Inline for a handful of claims.
• Scaled: a Workflow stage that emits the claim list, a parallel stage that verifies each independently, then a synthesis stage that rewrites. Route verification to a fresh context so it does not see the draft.

Composes with

• cite-guard: CoVe verifies claims by re-deriving them; cite-guard attaches the source. Use together: verify, then cite.
• self-consistency: vote across answers; CoVe checks one answer's claims. Different axes, combine for high-stakes.
• adversarial-verify: the code-behavior analogue.

Honest limits

• Verification questions answered from the same stale knowledge can still be wrong; prefer first-party sources for the checks.
• Costs an extra pass (draft + verify + revise). Worth it when a wrong detail is expensive, not for everything.
• Reported gains are on the paper's benchmarks; measure your own.