# Findings Are Evidence > A subagent, reviewer, or scout report is evidence, not findings — and so is your own first-hand defect analysis. Re-derive every Critical or High claim, everything touching a regulatory anchor, and the reasoning about the fix from the primary source before acting or writing it into a durable artifact. Triggers when consuming any agent or reviewer output and when recording a defect or fix analysis. Does not fire on low-severity suggestions with no gating or regulatory consequence — sample those rather than re-deriving them all. - Skill: `randommonicle/findings-are-evidence` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add randommonicle/findings-are-evidence` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/randommonicle/findings-are-evidence/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: AI & ML - Author: randommonicle (https://skillmd.com/u/randommonicle) - Updated: 2026-09-21 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/randommonicle/findings-are-evidence --- # Findings are evidence Ten incidents across two repos of acting on an overstated, stale, or simply wrong claim that arrived wearing a severity label: a "critical" shared-phone exploit refuted by reading the installed dependency's source; a reviewer's suggested correction that was itself wrong on the statute; a scout asserting a directory did not exist when it did; a verifier "blessing" a wrong claim because the brief it was handed contained the error. Layer: one of the six always-on norms; this file is the playbook. ## The rule Reports are inputs to verification, not outputs of it. Before a claim gates a merge, enters a durable artifact, or triggers work: re-derive it from the primary source if it is rated Critical or High, touches a regulatory anchor, or is your own analysis of a defect or fix. ## How to apply - **A severity label is a hypothesis.** Before gating anything on a "Blocker", refute it against ground truth — the installed `node_modules` source, the live catalog, the actual runtime — not against the reporter's confidence. - **The brief handed to a verifier is itself a claim.** A verification pass inherits its brief's errors; a specialist contradicting the brief earns a primary-source check, not an override. - **Your own conclusions qualify.** Verify the claim you make about the FIX, not just the claim you were given — the remedy's reasoning earns its own verification pass. - **A failure message is a symptom, not a diagnosis** ("not recognized" is not "not installed"). This is the canonical home of that rule; verified-citations cross-references it. - **A convenience tool that mirrors a first-party CLI must be diffed against the CLI** before its output is committed — an MCP typegen once emitted a 483-line-short file that passed every gate. Prefer the path the project's own scripts drive. - **A wrong exploit can still sit on a real smell.** Fix what is real; drop the inflated severity. Refutation is not exoneration. ## What this skill does not do It does not organise multi-reviewer processes (committee-review) and does not govern citation formatting (verified-citations). It governs the epistemic status of claims, whoever produced them. ## Route The claim you are weighing is not a review of the work but a statement **inside** the artefact you are auditing, of the "verified against the ledger" or "a demand was pulled and checked" kind: load **trace-one-record**, rule 3. Same principle, different trigger, and a reader auditing a spreadsheet will not think to load a skill about agent findings. ## Why Agents and reviewers are rewarded for finding things, so their output skews confident; and self-produced analysis carries the same bias with less scrutiny. Every incident in the evidence was cheaper to re-derive than to act on wrongly. Evidence: PropOS LESSONS_LEARNED Sessions 12, 15, 16, 22, 35, 42, 43, 2026-07-07, 2026-07-20; ASH LESSONS_LEARNED 2026-07-09.