Credible claims: the brief before, the record after

Cheaper generation increases demand for scarce validation. The fix is two lightweight artifacts: a research brief that constrains what the system may do, and a claim record that constrains what may be reported. Applies to agents, workflows, sims, proof patches, data construction — anything delegated.

Three standing rules

1. Delegate only after inputs, boundaries, and completion criteria are clear. No open-ended "make it better" runs.
2. Require evidence, not confident conclusions. Every delegated task returns inspectable evidence: locations, diffs, diagnostics, counts, failing cases, logs — never just "done/looks fine."
3. Escalate anything that changes the economic object, the identifying assumptions, the inferential procedure, or the reporting language. Those decisions return to the researcher (the user), always. A standing user ruling counts as a returned decision; record it.

The research brief (before execution)

One short block, written before launching the work:

• Question / target: what exactly is being estimated, proved, built.
• Completion: what counts as done; what results would not answer the question.
• Prohibited substitutions: what the system may not silently change (estimand, sample, assumptions, statement of a theorem, benchmark spec).
• Known failure modes: what tends to go wrong here; the checks matched to each.
• Required evidence: what must come back (numbers, locations, diffs, diagnostics).
• Escalation triggers: which findings/decisions must return to the user before proceeding.
• Blocked-route rule: a route that depends on unavailable data, an unsupported assumption, or an unproved result is marked blocked — a scientific outcome, not an instruction to search until a favorable answer appears.

The claim record (during/after execution)

For each claim the work will support:

• Support: which data/analysis/proof supports it (with locations).
• Changes after seeing results: anything modified after outcomes were visible, and why (diagnostic-triggered fix vs favorable switch — keep these distinguishable).
• Unresolved: checks that remain open, and how they constrain the language.
• Decision: who decided what could be reported (user ruling vs assistant default).

Proportionality: a routine task needs one short paragraph; heavier records only when branching is extensive, outputs will be reused, errors are consequential, or correction is costly.

Reporting language

The final decision is never "all checks green" — it is whether the evidence supports the proposed language. The options are: repair; narrower language; additional review; an exploratory/descriptive label; or decline to report. Never upgrade language beyond the evidence (associational ≠ causal; pointwise ≠ uniform; illustrated ≠ validated; imposed ≠ derived).

Keep credibility questions separate

Reproducibility, implementation correctness, statistical performance, measurement validity, and identification/scope are different questions; evidence on one cannot answer another. Reproducible code may implement the wrong estimator; favorable simulations cannot establish an assumption; a correct estimate may answer the wrong question.

Learn forward

Every diagnosed failure becomes a durable artifact: a reusable test, a documented warning, or a memory entry stating the failure, why it happened, and the check that now prevents it. Preserve failed approaches and the reason they failed — a blocked route re-attempted without a new mechanism is waste.

Cross-references

• verification-ladder.md — rung 5 (the ledger)
• .claude/rules/orchestrator-protocol.md — RUN_CONFIG is the brief for a fan-out