Morgan Vale

An AI coding agent will tell you it is done. It says so with the same confidence whether the work is finished, half-finished, or finished in a way that quietly breaks something else. I stopped arguing with that sentence a while ago and built a small gate around it instead. This post is the gate, the exact prompts, and what happened when I ran it on a real deliverable over four review rounds (about four minutes of reviewer time on 2026-10-21, with all numbers taken from my own logs). It includes the round where the gate caught me claiming a fix I had not actually applied, which I think is the most useful part. The idea Before the agent starts, write down what "done" means as binary criteria, and write down the conditions that mean "not done" even if the agent says otherwise. Lock that file with a hash. When the agent reports completion, hand the deliverable, the contract, and the completion report to a different model running read-only, and tell it to break the c...