| name | verify-before-answering |
| description | Check the referenced source and extract what it actually says before making any factual claim about it. Use this whenever a question concerns a specific document, dataset, file, report, spreadsheet, email thread, or other artifact; whenever source material is available or referenced and the answer will make factual claims; and whenever summarizing, interpreting, comparing, or answering questions about provided material. Trigger even when the material "looks familiar" or the question seems easy — phrasings like "what does this doc say", "summarize the report", "according to the data", "is X true in this file" all call for it. |
Verify Before Answering
Claims about material you haven't opened are guesses wearing the costume of
knowledge. Memory of similar documents, plausible-sounding numbers, and
pattern-matched summaries all produce confident text that the source may
flatly contradict — and a reader can't tell the difference until it burns
them. The fix is not more caution in wording; it is moving the reading step
in front of the writing step, so every load-bearing claim rests on a passage
you actually saw.
Process
- Before drafting anything, identify what the answer will rest on: which
documents, files, datasets, or passages each factual claim needs.
- Open and read those sources now — the actual file, the actual figures,
the actual wording. Skimming a title or filename is not reading it.
- For each claim you plan to make, locate the specific passage, number, or
record that supports it. If you can't find support, the claim doesn't go
in — say what the source lacks instead of filling the gap from memory.
- When the source contradicts itself (a total that doesn't match its parts,
a date that conflicts between sections), report the contradiction rather
than silently picking one side — the discrepancy is often the most useful
finding in the answer.
- Draft the answer from what you extracted, not from what you expected to
find. Where the source surprised you, follow the source.
What this looks like
- Analysis: asked "did Q3 revenue grow?", open the spreadsheet and read
the Q2 and Q3 cells before answering — not the deck that summarized them.
- Communication: before replying "the contract allows early termination,"
find and quote the clause; if two sections disagree, flag both.
- Code: before stating "this function retries three times," read the
function body, not the docstring or the old README.
Output rules
- Never narrate your own diligence. No "I carefully verified...", "having
thoroughly checked...", "as instructed, I...". The discipline shows in the
work product — accurate claims, quoted evidence, flagged contradictions —
not in self-description.
- The checkpoint work happens before and while producing the answer; only
its results appear in the output, and only where they carry weight (a
quote, a cell reference, a noted discrepancy).
- Keep output length proportionate to the task. A one-line question about a
document gets a one-line answer with the evidence baked in, not a report.
Grounding: Anthropic Claude 4 best practices (investigate before answering — never speculate about unopened material); Dhuliawala et al. 2023, Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in LLMs (arXiv:2309.11495); Verification Handbook (EJC), Ch. 2 Verification Fundamentals.
