Verification-First Engineering

No unit of work is done until it has been verified against explicit Acceptance Criteria and corrected until those criteria are met. Every meaningful artifact must have checkable criteria before it is accepted.

The required loop is:

1. Draft against a stated set of Acceptance Criteria or Constraints.
2. Verify the draft against those criteria.
3. Identify specific defects (not vague dissatisfaction).
4. Correct only the identified defects. If the criteria themselves are incomplete or incorrect, the human must revise them; AI Agents may not alter Acceptance Criteria.
5. Re-verify. Accept and freeze the result only when the criteria are satisfied.

Human acceptance is mandatory for high-stability, high-blast-radius, or high-stakes artifacts (core Invariants, major Component Specifications, safety-critical Designs, significant architectural decisions, and anything that defines System-level "done"). Lower-level work that sits inside already-accepted Contracts and criteria may be accepted by automated checks or by AI Agents operating strictly within those pre-approved bounds. The depth of verification must match the Blast Radius and stability of the artifact.

AI Agents may generate verification evidence and perform checks. They may not change the Acceptance Criteria.

Consequences:

• Drift and silent quality loss are reduced because every change is checked against a fixed reference.
• AI Agents receive clear, local signals about what is wrong instead of global or ambiguous feedback.
• Rework stays bounded; corrections target concrete failures rather than restarting from scratch.
• Long-horizon coherence is protected because accepted artifacts remain stable until a new, justified change is required.
• Human attention stays on the decisions that only a human may make.

The principle is domain-general. In software it governs code, tests, and specifications. In a floating city it governs design documents, calculations, safety cases, and fabrication specifications. The form of the evidence differs between domains, but in every domain work is incomplete until it is verified.

An artifact that has not passed this loop is not done.

Applied in the Specification #

These clauses of the Normative Structural Specification name Verification-First Engineering among their grounds.

• §1.3 Human authority
• §1.6 Formality scales with risk; every required Entity must exist
• §4.7 Iteration discipline
• §5.7 Work Units must be verifiable
• §5.9 Work Units for long-horizon work
• §6.2 Required sections, linted
• §6.9 Verification method assigned at authoring
• §7.1 Done is a checkable criterion
• §7.2 The verification loop
• §7.4 Verification Procedures are authored before the Work Unit
• §7.11 Independent verification
• §7.19 Human acceptance by class
• §15.2 Non-delegable human authorities
• §15.3 Authority scales with Blast Radius
• §16.2 Minimum Normative Check set
• §16.3 Normative Check outcomes must be recorded