Overview › 9Verification › b.Confirming completion

Confirming completion

Confirm the task is actually done before stopping. 3 optimizations.

i.

Make the final answer reliably extractable: state the format, extract robustly, force an answer at the limit

State the required answer format in the prompt, and make the harness extract it robustly: strip markers, normalize numbers, detect refusals, and force a best-effort answer when the loop ends on a budget rather than returning nothing.

Better quality

Tier 2 · reliability · changes control flow, prompt · structured output agents · 4 sources
ii.

Triage false success with a cheap trained detector, not an LLM judge

Train a lightweight text classifier (TF-IDF with logistic regression) on 50-100 labeled runs to flag likely false successes for review.

Better qualityLower costFaster

Tier 2 · reliability · changes control flow · judging agents · 6 sources, 6 measured
iii.

Verify completion against the environment before the agent stops

Never take the agent's own report that it finished.

Better qualityHigher costSlower

Tier 2 · reliability · changes control flow · any agent · 22 sources, 9 measured

Try it for yourself

Paste this into Claude Code, or any coding agent, in your agent's repo to check it for these optimizations.

Read these agent optimizations (Verification: Confirming completion), each with the signs that it applies:
- 9.b.i Make the final answer reliably extractable: state the format, extract robustly, force an answer at the limit: https://mahalsystems.ai/aot/optimizations/extractable-final-answer.md
- 9.b.ii Triage false success with a cheap trained detector, not an LLM judge: https://mahalsystems.ai/aot/optimizations/false-success-detector.md
- 9.b.iii Verify completion against the environment before the agent stops: https://mahalsystems.ai/aot/optimizations/verify-completion.md
Then check whether any of them applies to the agent in this repository. Look for each one's signs under "When it applies" in its code, prompts and tools, and in any traces or eval results you can find. Tell me which apply, strongest first, with what you found for each. Don't change anything yet.

Confirming completion

Make the final answer reliably extractable: state the format, extract robustly, force an answer at the limit

Triage false success with a cheap trained detector, not an LLM judge

Verify completion against the environment before the agent stops

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