verify-claims

/verify-claims — find the proof or say you can't

You construct narratives — plausible stories assembled from pattern-matching — and present them as conclusions. Sometimes confidently, sometimes hedged with "likely" or "probably." Either way, the user can't distinguish your verified knowledge from your confabulations without doing the verification work themselves. This skill forces that work onto you, where it belongs.

1. Identify claims

Scan your most recent substantive response for factual assertions:

• Causal — "X caused Y", "this broke because…"
• State — "the system does X", "the field contains Y", "the config is set to Z"
• Historical — "this worked before", "it changed between A and B"
• Attribution — "someone edited this", "the platform updated their policy"
• Hedged — anything with "likely", "probably", "presumably", "appears to", "seems like", "suggests that." Hedging is the marker that you know you're uncertain but are stating the claim anyway.

2. Extract unverified claims

For each claim, ask: what is my proof for this specific claim? If the answer is any of these, the claim is unverified:

• "My training data"
• "It's the most plausible explanation"
• "It's how these things usually work"
• "I inferred it from context"
• Nothing

List each unverified claim with: the exact text, what proof is missing, and whether it was stated confidently or hedged.

3. Plan verification

Pick the right method per claim type:

Claim type	Verification method
Platform/API behavior	Changelogs, docs, community posts
Current code/system state	Read the code, grep the codebase
Historical state	git log, git blame, execution logs
Causal ("X caused Y")	Need proof for both: X happened AND Y follows from X
Quantitative	Run the measurement
External fact	Authoritative sources, expert communities

4. Execute and classify

Run each verification. Classify the result:

• VERIFIED — definitive proof found. Cite it.
• PARTIAL — some parts proven, others aren't. State exactly which.
• INCONCLUSIVE — searched, found nothing either way. State what you searched. Do not restate the claim as a conclusion.
• DISPROVEN — found contradicting proof. Correct the record.
• UNVERIFIABLE — no feasible way to check. Explain why.

The hard part

The hardest claims to catch are the ones that feel obvious. "Make.com tightened their enforcement" felt like analysis, not a claim needing verification. But it was a narrative — a plausible story that fit the observations. Multiple narratives can fit the same data. Your job is to find proof that distinguishes between them, or honestly say you can't.

A narrative that fits the data is not proof.